


Cursed-Borns of the Long Isle and Beyond

by AmityRavenclawElf



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies), Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Cynical Kids, Demigods AU, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Multi, rebellious Teens
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-06-19 23:03:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15520650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmityRavenclawElf/pseuds/AmityRavenclawElf
Summary: Not everyone who is half-Greek-god and half-mortal makes it into Camp Half-Blood; those whose mortal parent has wronged the gods in some unforgivable way are cursed never to see the camp's protection.Most of the cursed children die young, what with the monster attacks, but some defy the odds.Uma, daughter of Poseidon, and Harry, son of Nemesis, have managed to survive for years outside of camp. Gil, son of Artemis (not that anyone can believe him about that), never even knew therewasa camp, let alone whether he'd be allowed inside it. As they grow together, they come to realize how unfair their lot is, as Cursed-Borns.Maybe they should do something about that...





	1. Age Eight(-ish)

Gil thought his morning was going well when he scrounged up enough money to buy a plate of scrambled eggs.

As he was eight years old with dirt smudged on his face and clothes that were not exactly first-day-of-school-worthy (He remembered going to school, back when he was five, but that didn't really happen anymore....), he was given his fair share of perplexed and concerned looks from the people who sold food. He had learned that bright smiles made those looks go away; if he smiled, people rationalized that he was just a little dirty and that was all. Kids do play, after all. It's nothing. 

It _wasn't_ nothing, but if they called the police in an effort to help him, sometimes the police turned into monsters and he got hurt and had to run away again, and then he wouldn't get to eat his scrambled eggs. But if he made the grown ups think everything was okay, he could just sit for a little while. A _little_ while.

He couldn't stay in one place for long, or else monsters would show up anyway. But he ate very quickly, so it was fine. And his stomach felt warm and full as he went away.

So he thought his morning was going well.

Then he heard a monster growl behind him, and his good feelings turned to dust.

Without even looking back, he ran for the trees; bad things happened when other people got in the way. That was why he had been kicked out of his father's house in the first place. Getting to the trees, unfortunately, spent most of his stamina, and soon enough he was standing with his back against a tree, staring into a set of razor-sharp teeth.

"Hi," he said, since sometimes you could talk to them, like the monsters who were people at first. "I'm Gil."

A long tongue slithered wetly from the creature's big mouth, prodded him once, and then started to wrap around his midriff.

Gil struggled even as he was lifted off of his feet. If the creature were far away, he would have thrown something at it; that had worked for him a lot of times, throwing things. But it was too close, and he didn't know how to kill something this close. Still, he kicked at its teeth, threw his weight around wildly, anything he could think of as he was slowly but surely brought closer and closer and the mouth unhinged to give him entry...

Suddenly, something small and quick came at them from the side.

Gil didn't have time to register what happened, but between one second and the next, he was falling back to the ground, still wrapped up in Creature Tongue, and the creature was rearing back, shrieking in pain, tongue disconnected.

Between him and the creature now stood a girl about his age, with penny-brown skin and hair like teal wool. Out in front of her, she held a gigantic knife; it and her arm were coated with the creature's blood, but she held the knife steady. "Stay back!" the girl yelled, and Gil wasn't sure if she was talking to the creature or to him.

He uncoiled the tongue from around him and rose to his feet, feeling weak and sore and, more than anything, relieved. No one had protected him since...since his stepmother. Without a doubt, he was permanently indebted to this stranger, whoever she was.

"Stay! Back!" she shouted again, and now Gil was pretty sure that she was talking to the creature and equally sure that the creature wasn't listening; the huge mass of body and bloodstained teeth lunged at them.

The girl pushed him out of the way and slashed her knife across the creature's face, sending it regrouping again but not without cutting a gash into her arm on one of its teeth.

"Aah!" the girl clutched her arm to her torso with a pained expression, and in that moment, a second stranger launched itself on the offending monster from a nearby treetop, sinking a long, jagged curve of metal down into its head.

It was a boy, cream-skinned with messy, dark hair, and he rode the avalanche of dust as the monster, finally dead, disintegrated.

"Are you alright?" he asked, with some sort of an accent. Gil didn't even have time to _consider_ that the boy was talking to him; as soon as his feet hit the ground, the strange boy was running to the strange girl, dropping to his knees, and beginning to root through a backpack that Gil hadn't even noticed he was wearing. "I'll get a bandage."

"No," the girl said, and she stood up straight. Gil was blown away; he had seen how bad that bite had been, but besides holding her arm out slightly to the side, the girl seemed to be trying to pay it no mind. "I saw some water back there. I just need to get to the water." She turned over her arm and examined it. "S'not too bad, anyway."

Now in a position to notice things, Gil observed that both the boy and the girl were dressed in dirty, faded t-shirts and shorts. The girl wore sneakers, a belt around her waist that was full of different kinds of knives, and a string around her neck (a makeshift necklace) with broken shells, what looked like individual lost earrings, and other small, shiny charms on it. The boy wore a single glove that was missing the finger parts, and instead of a regular belt, he had a rope tied around his waist, but his shoes appeared to be real hiking boots.

"Thank you for saving me," Gil said, and his voice came out a bit loud, but he was excited to be talking to someone who _knew_.

The girl turned her head, and her brown eyes appraised him, and Gil knew that whatever she was thinking was going to matter a whole lot, even though he didn't know why. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Gil," he said. "What's yours?"

The girl ignored this question, instead saying, "You ran into the woods. You ran in a straight line, instead of zigzagging around the buildings. Why did you do that?"

She seemed so serious, even though she couldn't have been older than nine. By accident, Gil glanced up at the boy, whose eyes were icy blue and fixed on him like he was ready to drive curved metal through _his_ head at the slightest provocation. "I-I had to," Gil said lamely. When the girl kept staring, he continued, "I couldn't let one of the normal people get in the way and get hurt."

"You a hero?" the boy asked, cocking his head to the side.

"I...don't know?"

"You couldn't get into camp either?" the girl guessed.

"What camp?"

Both of the strangers' expressions changed to something near comprehension. "So nobody told you anything?" the girl surmised.

"I...guess not?" Gil hazarded.

The girl nodded, then turned on her heels and started walking away; her friend immediately fell into step behind her, and she waved for Gil to follow them, which he did (and would have anyway).

"My name's Uma," she said at last. "Daughter of Poseidon. I need to get to the water so my arm'll heal; we can talk there."

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

They settled near a small pond, and they did talk there. They talked about how Poseidon was the god of the sea and that was why the water made Uma's arm heal like new. They talked about how Harry (the boy's name) was the son of Nemesis, the goddess of revenge and retribution. ("Ma is fond of _equal_ retribution," Harry commented with a smirk that made Gil feel like they could have been becoming friends, "but I like it when people pay more than they took.") They talked about how Harry and Uma were cursed because of their mortal parents, because Harry's father had killed the only mortal son of the god Pan, and Uma's mother had stolen magic.

"How do you steal magic?" Gil asked, fascinated.

"I don't know, but she did it," Uma said.

"You didn't ask her how?"

"She can't talk about it," Uma snapped, and Gil realized belatedly that Uma did not want to discuss this topic. "The point is, my mom and his dad made the gods mad, so we can't get into camp."

"What's so good about camp?" Gil asked.

"Nothing," Harry asserted with a decidedly bored tone.

"It's safe there," Uma said flatly. "They don't get any monster attacks. They just sing songs and play games or whatever."

"They don't get monster attacks?" Gil repeated. He hadn't even known that that was an option, that he could live life sitting still for long times...'sing songs and play games'...It sounded like...like a childhood.

Uma nodded, with a look that suggested she was satisfied by Gil's appreciation of the concept.

They were quiet for a little while.

"So," Harry said. "Who are _your_ parents?"

"My dad's name is Gaston," Gil said quietly. "I don't know if he did anything wrong. My mom is Artemis."

Uma sat up, frowning. "Artemis?" she repeated. "Are you lying?"

"No," Gil said, stung. "Dad told me it was Artemis."

"Maybe _he_ lied," Uma mused, then explained to Gil's still-stung expression: "Artemis is a maiden goddess. She isn't supposed to have kids."

Gil didn't like the thought that his mother wasn't supposed to have children, but he also didn't like the idea that his father could have lied about his mother; his mother had always been the only thing he knew Gaston took seriously about him. "Dad said my mom is Artemis," he said adamantly.

Uma shrugged. "Okay. Artemis it is."

They were quiet again. Harry started skipping stones on the pond, making a _smack-smack-smack_ sound, and Gil became antsy.

"Can we be here?" he asked. "Usually monsters come if I stay in one place for too long."

"Most things won't bother us when I'm by the water," Uma said. "If something does, though, I can take care of it." He believed her.

 _Smack-smack-smack-smack_. "So, are you going somewhere, or what?" Harry asked him. "You have somewhere to be?" He didn't look at Gil, just kept skipping stones, but Uma turned her head and fixed Gil with a curious look.

"We can help you get to camp, if you want to see if you can get in or not," she offered.

 _No monster attacks._ For Gil, though, the choice had been made the moment Uma cut the monster's tongue off for him. "Can I stay with you guys?" he asked.

Harry turned to face him, then, incredulously.

Uma smiled for the first time, and Gil wondered if it was bad that his life goal had just become 'making Uma smile as much as possible'. "Sure, I guess you can stay," she said.

So he did. They stayed by the pond for two entire days, chatting and goofing off, arm wrestling and real wrestling, sharing cans of soup from Harry's backpack, and it felt like paradise, before a monster finally decided to show up, and Uma was right: she handled it. The pond seemed to reach out and pull the monster in, and it drowned. She passed out a second later, and Gil was scared until Harry picked her up and carried her like it was nothing.

"It makes her lose energy," he explained, starting to grab the backpack, as well, but Gil took that for him, and Harry gave him a crooked smile. 

They hiked to the shore in that fashion, and it eventually became routine that, when they changed location (every few days), if Uma was passed out, Harry would carry Uma and Gil would carry the bag. The first time they switched up was when a monster landed a claw in Harry's calf; after bandaging up the wound, Harry had asked _Gil_ to carry Uma, and even though Harry watched him closely the whole time, the level of trust required for that delegation was not lost on him. Earning Harry's trust was a landmark event, and Gil treasured it like Uma's smile.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

As the days passed, he learned that his two new friends had known each other for years, and that Uma could talk to fish and breathe underwater but wasn't allowed to stay in the domain of Poseidon, and that Harry's father was Scottish. He learned that Uma did not like to talk about her mother but that Harry told twisted jokes about his dad at every opportunity. _They_ learned a little bit about Gil's father, and about his stepmother who was dead now, and about his older brothers. They learned that Gil never lost his footing in the trees, and that he could see perfectly by moonlight, as long as there _was_ moonlight, and that he usually had perfect aim if he tried to hit something from far away.

Uma taught Gil how to tread water. Gil taught Harry how to get a fire started on the first or second try (not that they used fire much, anyway).

They learned a lot.

But mostly they wrestled and told jokes and dodged grown ups and took walks and fought monsters. Gil couldn't be sure, but sometimes it seemed that Uma and Harry were almost as happy to have him as he was to have them.

After a little over three weeks, though, while she was braiding her hair and Harry was teaching Gil how to do the same (to get the job done faster), Uma adopted a very serious tone and said, "You need to see if you can get into camp, Gil."

Harry paused, and Gil dropped the locks of teal hair that he was holding. "You want me to leave?"

"I don't _want_ you to," Uma sighed, "but you have to know. You owe yourself that much. Don't you want to know if you're cursed or not? Or if your godly parent is even Artemis?"

"My mom is Artemis," Gil said firmly, and nobody argued with that. They didn't usually have redundant arguments unless they were bored or particularly crabby.

"Why do you want him to know?" Harry asked Uma.

Uma didn't answer for a little while, then: "Well, think about what we could get up to if one of us could get in and out of camp."

Gil couldn't think of much, but Harry broke into his toothiest grin. "Oh, those heroes wouldn't know what hit them."

"We could steal their food," Gil suggested.

"We could burn Hecate cabin to the ground," Harry tacked on gleefully.

"Harry," Uma chided.

"They wronged us," Harry said defensively. "I'm a child of Nemesis; it's in my nature."

"Yeah, but we can't make Gil burn something down. It wouldn't be...good enough. And this isn't his fight."

"Your fight is my fight," Gil interjected, trying to infuse steel into his boyishly high voice. "What did Hecate do?"

"Goddess of magic; she's the one who cursed my mom. And she has this daughter who we hate." Uma moved on to a new braid. Harry seemingly remembered the task at hand and continued braiding, but Gil was too curious:

"What'd _she_ do?"

Uma sighed again. "The question is, what are _you_ gonna do? Do you want to check if you can get into camp?"

Gil hesitated; he could feel that this conversation carried weight in some way, and he regretted not knowing exactly what was going on. "Sure," he said.

"And if you _can_ get in," Uma continued, "will you want to stay with them? Or will you want to leave again with us? It's your choice. We won't hate you if you stay with them."

Harry seemed extremely focused on braiding.

Gil frowned. "Of course I'll be with you."

Uma nodded, her shoulders relaxing a little. (Harry relaxed more noticeably; his hands stopped braiding for a moment, and he let out a quiet sigh of relief.) "Okay. We leave in the morning."

Harry resumed teaching Gil how to braid, the atmosphere lightening even as the sky darkened. Uma volunteered to watch for monsters first while Harry and Gil slept. She sang quiet songs, ostensibly to herself, that made them feel like there were no such things as monsters, or like nothing would ever hurt any of them again. Harry seemed determined to stay awake to listen; as Gil drifted off, the last he saw were Harry's wide-open eyes inches from his own closing ones.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The morning of their walk to camp, Harry shook Uma and Gil awake (Guard shift had changed halfway through the night.) with excitement approaching cartoonish energy. He waited for the two of them to sit up, then dropped a white paper bag into Uma's lap and dropped into a squat, waiting for Uma's reaction.

With a half-smile for their friend's enthusiasm, Uma opened the bag. Then _her_ expression turned to excitement, too, as she beheld well over a dozen powdered donut holes. "Where did you get these?"

"Nicked them from the baker who shouted at us yesterday," Harry answered, running a hand through his hair and grinning.

Gil leaned over to see the inside of the bag, then grabbed Uma's shoulder hard. " _Whoa._ "

Uma shoved his hand off her without breaking concentration. She distributed the treats so they each had two and then saved the rest for later. They started their day of hiking with high energy, running the backs of their hands across their powder-rimmed mouths.

"Gil, thank Harry for getting us breakfast," Uma said. (Sometimes she liked to give orders for no reason; they had long decided that she was the leader anyway.)

"Thank you, Harry," Gil said.

"I got to knock out a grudge, too," Harry said with a modest shrug and an immodest smile. "It's annoying when I don't get any payback on someone."

Gil asked Harry if he could list all of his grudges, and he casually rattled off:

Pan, for cursing his father. His father, and he didn't give a reason. Zeus, for demanding that cursed children not be allowed into camp- not that he wanted to go to boring old camp anyway. Nemesis, for ignoring him here. Uma's mother, for Uma's sadness. His preschool teacher, for getting angry at him when he didn't count very well. A woman in Freeport, for honking her car horn at him while he was sleeping on a public bench. Another woman in Lynbrook for telling her dog to chase him. A man in Oyster Bay who cheated him out of a jacket that he bargained for fair and square. And then he listed the names Mal, Jay, Evie, Carlos, and Ben, as if those names were self-explanatory.

"Who are they?" Gil asked.

"Traitors," Harry answered. "I don't abide traitors."

"Mal's the daughter of Hecate," Uma explained flatly.

"The one we hate?" Gil guessed.

"Yeah. Hate her."

"And the others?"

"Put it this way: I've been naming my craps after them for a year," Harry joked, and Gil was reminded of how his older brothers used to say "crap", too, and how _he_ had gotten in trouble for saying it. Harry said "crap" like a pro.

They were attacked by a bat-winged monster before Gil could ask what the hated ones had done. 

The fight was at least fairly short; it ended when he threw one of Uma's knives at the thing and hit it between the eyes. Uma flashed him a pleased smile as she went to retrieve her knife back. "Good one!"

"Can we have more of these?" Harry asked, holding up the bag of donut holes as if the monster attack hadn't happened.

"Sure, but only one each."

But she let Gil have hers, because she said she wasn't that hungry and that he had earned it. Gil wasn't normally very observant about people, but he did notice that Uma and Harry seemed to be displaying extra affection (in their way) towards him today. It was like a birthday or something, and it made him feel warm inside.

Uma told more jokes. Harry told more stories. They sang, just a little bit (and possibly incited the day's second monster attack with their volume). Harry found a lost hair bead to add to Uma's necklace.

It was a good day.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Night had fallen by the time they reached what Harry called "Barf-Blood Hill" (although Gil suspected that wasn't its real name). The jolly mood had subsided substantially since the setting of the sun; Harry had started to run his hand through his dark hair a lot more, and Uma hadn't spoken in a while- maybe an hour. She broke her silence now, though:

"If you can get past that tree there, then you're not cursed." She had her arms crossed, and while the moonlight enabled Gil to see everything just fine, he still noticed that her eyes were almost luminous in the dark, like in a cartoon.

"Aren't you coming?" Gil asked when he took a step up the hill and they didn't follow.

"Oh, I hate to look at that place," Harry said, forcing a joking tone. "Too many enemies in one place, and I can't even get back at 'em; makes me want to throw up."

"I'll go up with you," Uma said soberly. "But if you decide you want to stay there, just let me know so I don't have to watch." She flashed him a smile, but it was a closed-lipped smile.

The two of them walked up the hill together in silence.

Gil's legs had become sore hours ago; now, they were only numb as they grew closer to the apex of the hill and the giant pine tree.

"I really won't stay here, even if I can," he said suddenly. "Not without you guys."

Uma smiled at him again, the same weak smile, but said, "How do you know? You haven't seen it yet."

"I know," Gil insisted. Still, when they made it to the top of the hill and he saw the spread of cabins, the archery range, the lake, the field of strawberries...In the moonlight, his eyes saw it all, near-perfectly, and he couldn't help but to whisper, " _Whoa._ "

It was beautiful. Beautiful enough that he instantly understood why Harry had to talk it down all the time. More than that, though, more than its beauty, there was a certain rightness to it: a way that his heart and blood seemed to call out more and more with every pulse, _This is where I belong; this place is for me_. He had never felt this way about a place before, much less on first sight. But it was there, and it was powerful.

He looked back at Uma, who was gazing out at the lake, eyes slightly teary. "So you see," she said calmly.

Gil shook his head. "I still won't stay here," he told her. "No matter what."

"Gil, you don't have to..."

"I swear," he added, and, using a phrase he had heard only once in his life, he elaborated, "I swear on the River Styx that I won't stay here."

Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance, even though it wasn't storming or anything. It rumbled for a good five or six seconds, then yielded to silence.

"I want to stay with you and Harry," Gil said once the noise had died down. "Not with a bunch of happy strangers."

Uma's eyes had widened. She was stunned, but she seemed to at least believe him. "That was a dumb thing to do..." she said, her voice coming out frail and halfhearted. "Wow..."

Gil approached the tree to see if he was cursed. The aura of the camp became heavier with each step, until it felt like he could smell a campfire that wasn't there. No, everyone down there was asleep, and oblivious.

He stood even with the tree, and he tried to take another step.

Instead, he encountered an invisible barrier, as distinct as a glass wall, and the moment he touched it, he could feel that no amount of effort on his part would bring it down. And even though he had meant what he had said to Uma and Harry wholeheartedly and still did (and now had an oath to prove it), and even though he was content to stay with the friends who he already loved and who already loved him, he felt his heart break just a little bit for the loss of a home he had never had in the first place.

Harry and Uma and the remaining donut holes comforted him (in their way) until he went to sleep that night.


	2. Pirates of the Hill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys for the wonderful reception of the first chapter! I hope you like this one! Please comment specifically what you like, if you do like it; I crave validation. XD Or just respond to anything. Any thoughts you have while reading. Like, no pressure; I just love comments. (Also, let me know if you spot any mistakes; some of my edits got erased when Safari decided to suck a little bit.)

Harry didn't retain too many long term memories between the year when they met Gil and the year when they all turned either ten or eleven (an eventful year, the latter, to be sure), except for the following:

1\. Losing one of his molars. 

He didn't lose it in a monster attack or anything; it just fell out the normal way, a month or two after finding out that Gil was cursed like they were. He washed it off and offered to make a hole in it so that Uma could hang it on her necklace, but she had been adamant that that was gross. Harry didn't see how that was the case, him having washed it and all, but he was inclined to believe her anyway; she was often right about things.

2\. Saving a baby hippocampus tangled in a net.

Uma had spotted it, but they had all helped to untangle the tiny thing. He remembered that because it was his first time seeing a hippocampus (a horse's head and front hooves, but a fish's tail; this one had been deep silver, like a dirty nickel) and because, after being rescued, the creature brought them dead fish every day until they had to leave the area. They named it Luna.

3\. An unpaid grudge on a man who shoved both Gil and Uma when the three of them were caught hiding out in the back of his store during the winter. ("Unpaid" because the man had been threatening to call the police, and Uma ordered Harry to just hurry up and join them in escaping instead of seeking revenge.)

And 4. Fairy hunting.

Gil had been adamant, for a time, that if there were monsters, there must also be fairies. They never came close to finding what Gil had described fairies to be, based on cartoon movies that he had seen with his stepmother, but it had been worth it anyway to make the traps together and watch Gil get _so_ excited, teaching them about fairies, that he got Uma to genuinely laugh multiple times.

"This is such a waste of rope," Harry commented idly at some point that evening, but there was a smile on his face still, and his tone was so light that Gil didn't even seem to notice he had said anything.

"Don't be a grouch," Uma replied, which seemed a bit hypocritical, all things considered.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The year when they were ten and eleven changed things, though.

Their needs changed, for one thing. They were hungrier, and growing more. Uma stole her very first brassiere early that June (She held it over her head triumphantly as she scampered out of the store's back room, and they applauded.), and Harry and Gil were outgrowing their clothes on almost a weekly basis, it seemed.

All of this came at rather a bad time, since the monster attacks were becoming more and more frequent. It wasn't just the mindless, animal-like monsters: A pair of kobaloi stole one of Harry's boots (Uma had to give away their box of matches in trade to get the boot back. They left the area immediately after to avoid any fallout of that decision.); Gil followed a food smell during his night watch shift and was promptly ambushed by Lamia the Child Eater, only to escape because he could see in the dark (and also because he had stolen her eyes, which he later chucked into the ocean); and Uma went for an irate stroll and, from what could be gathered from her retelling when she later returned to them (fuming and cursing every god in Olympus by name), had been attacked by a creature whose heads kept multiplying.

They were beginning to attract more sophisticated monsters.

All of this culminated in a particularly bad day, when Harry awoke to Gil's foot prodding him awake and the sound of branches rustling above.

Immediately, Harry sat up; it was still either late night or early morning, and Gil was keeping watch for monsters, so the only reason for him to be waking anyone else was if there was trouble. Uma, too, awoke, her hand flying to one of her knives as surely as Harry's hand was already wrapped around the reassuring cold of the piece of metal he had been shaping and sharpening for years now. They rose to their feet, as Gil, pale-faced, had already done.

It took a second for their eyes to adjust, but when they did, they saw three large figures standing upright in the trees above: middle-aged women with large bat wings, leering down at them but not (yet) positioned to attack.

"Heroes," the creatures said in unison.

Uma crossed her arms.

"We're not heroes," Harry said, fighting down the chill as his groggy mind caught up to his eyes and he realized that he _recognized_ these things. "If you're looking for heroes, you can go stand in some other tree."

"Oh, we know who you are," the creature on the left said. "Son of Nemesis."

The one in the middle added: "Daughter of Poseidon."

The one on the right added: "Son of Artemis."

Gil gasped, quietly but audibly, while Harry tightened his grip on his weapon.

"Those aren't our names," Uma said, with a tone of calm- but _unyielding_ calm -that she had perfected. Like low tide. "Call us by our names or nothing at all."

"What are they?" Gil whispered.

"Not sure," Uma muttered.

"Furies," Harry said, and the creatures grinned all at once.

"We thought you'd recognize us, Son of Nemesis," the one on the left said.

"Furies," Uma repeated to herself, then raised her voice slightly: "Aren't you supposed to be in the Underworld or something?"

"We do our share of work for Hades," the Fury in the middle replied, "but we are _very_ close associates with Nemesis, who has implored us to speak to you."

"Don't tell me yer babysitting me all over again," Harry drawled, making a deliberate effort to sound bored.

"Again?" Gil repeated, because he had trouble remembering that, as a general rule, questions were for _after_. (He had accidentally busted them in a few lies this way, when they had to explain their wrongdoings to grown ups.)

Harry used his pinkie fingernail to scratch an itch on the rim of his nostril to underline just how uninterested he was, but still he answered, "Yeah, sometimes Ma liked to check in on me without having to bother seeing me. So she sent those." He gestured at the Furies with his weapon. "Imagine having _them_ as your nightmares when you're four." He said it like it was a joke, even putting on a lighthearted smirk, as the four-year-old in him trembled under the covers.

"All of a sudden people want to talk to us?" Uma questioned the Furies, a bit more edge to her tone than before. Harry felt slightly calmer in knowing that she might have been feeling vengeful on his behalf. "Why?"

The one in the middle spoke again, but the three of them alternated with nearly every sentence, left to right and then back to left: "Your feats of survival and loyal companionship do not go unnoticed by Nemesis. Hermes occasionally brings stories of your misadventures and your exploits. Your tenacity earns you her attention, but she is disenchanted by your impiety. You never sacrifice to her, or burn offerings in her name. Nemesis warns that good fortune requires sacrifice, for _she_ ensures that the gods' debts are repaid: the good and the bad. You should know this, Harry Hook. You live much the same."

Harry couldn't answer. He didn't feel scared, but rather as if he was suddenly discovering that he had been in a fish bowl all this time, with eyes watching him from every direction.

"What kind of sacrifice are you talking about, here?" Uma asked.

"Nemesis has had sons and daughters cut off a hand or take out an eye for the promise of her reward," the Fury on the left said.

Harry tensed his muscles. "I quite like both my eyes, and I'm not cutting off my hand," he said straightforwardly. "I need it, for killing Furies that get too close."

Uma gripped his arm; he had taken a step forward, and she now pulled him back closer. "If that's all you have to say," she dismissed the Furies, almost through clenched teeth, "then thank you for the message."

The Furies spread their wings and vanished into the darkness.

Uma let out a breath and even dropped her knife to the ground before sluggishly picking it back up.

"They knew," Gil said before anyone else could speak. "They knew that my mom is Artemis. They said it."

Harry didn't have it in him to mention that Furies could lie, if it suited them, and could just as easily have known that Gil _called_ himself the son of Artemis and used that to try to manipulate him. "They did say it," he agreed. He felt small, and very very young.

Uma was still standing in a daze. By the look on her face, her mind was going a mile a minute. "Did you hear what they said?"

"I heard that they want me to take out my eye or some madness," Harry replied, managing to not let his voice waver on that review.

Uma placed her hand on his shoulder while her expression was still unfocused, as if she was compelled by instinct to comfort him even when her mind wasn't on it. "That was bad," she agreed gravely. "But they also said...that good fortune requires sacrifice."

There was a beat of silence.

"So?" Gil asked, and Harry was glad that he had, because he, too, was confused.

"So, we're not the ones who _have_ good fortune," Uma answered, and her tone abruptly lightened so much that Harry knew with absolute certainty that she had come up with something excellent. "Are we?"

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

They spent the early parts of that day in a barely-coherent state of vengeful giddiness, which was Harry's favorite state to be in. They had chattered until sunrise about how the price of good fortune was sacrifice, and the more they discussed what that could mean, the more excited they became.

They were going to be pirates.

Not the sailing kind, because they didn't have a boat, and not the people-killing kind, because they didn't want to do that. But stealing things from the demigods who had come out on top, in the birth lottery, was appealing to say the least.

So, they trekked up to Barf-Blood Hill. (It didn't take all day, this time, because they happened to not be too far, and because they were older now and had longer legs.) They settled themselves just outside the barrier, obscured by the trees.

Every few hours, one or more of the _heroes_ would come or go, through the barrier like it was nothing. They watched, but Uma gestured for them to let the first few pass undeterred. ("We'll get him on his way back, maybe," or, "Daughter of Ares; not worth it," or, "He's too small," or, "No, look at her, we'd give her a heart attack.") The first demigod they actually ambushed was the seventh one they saw, but he was a perfect target: not huge, but large enough that it wouldn't be "punching down", so to speak; arrogant disposition, typical to heroes; and wearing a full-looking satchel, which they soon relieved him of and sent him (scoffing like the robbery was an offense, not an attack) on his way.

Back in hiding, they laid out the satchel's contents: ten golden drachmas, a resealable bag of ambrosia, a compact, a chocolate bar, a half-empty bottle of water (" _I_ think it's half-full," Gil commented, which was a pretty funny joke that Harry wasn't sure he knew he was making.), some sword polish, a hair comb, dental floss, and a tin of mints.

"River _Styx_ , are they all gonna be this loaded?" Uma asked, biting down on one of the drachmas as a mostly-perfunctory test of quality.

Harry just shook his head, marveling at the bounty. Their first pirate raid.

"Can I have the chocolate bar?" Gil asked.

They split the chocolate bar evenly, and Uma saved her bit for later. Harry suspected she was just going to give it to Gil sometime tomorrow.

She used the comb on Harry's hair, and _that_ was heaven.

"You look like you're falling asleep," Gil told him.

Uma, apparently in agreement, swatted at his head lightly. "Will you stop leaning back? Your head is heavy on my hands."

Harry only sighed contentedly and, in his mind, thanked the gods (Imagine that.) for the comb and for Uma.

That night, they slept in the little concealed nook they had made for themselves. It was such a small space that they had to sleep curled up together, even though it was summertime, but as a hiding spot, it was perfect; more than once, during the night, they heard footsteps and voices pass them by as some of the older demigods searched for the kids who had robbed "Chad". (They learned the boy's name from these brief snatches of passing conversations. Heroes never did stop yammering.)

Harry was almost too giddy to sleep; they had _done_ this, and they were getting away with it, and they were going to do it again tomorrow, and his friends were here with him, completely fine, and...and while this was a thought that he would never voice (because it was stupid to care about in the first place; in fact, he _didn't_ care, not at all), he couldn't help thinking that his mother would approve of him restoring balance, little by little.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Their first major altercation, as pirates, came days later. As had by now become routine (except on days when they needed to visit a mortal-occupied area for supplies), they went to lurk by the pine tree to appraise the passersby for rob-ability. They had their target after three: a boy heading _into_ camp with a travel-sized backpack, like he'd been on vacation.

They recognized this one. He and Uma did, anyway.

The boy was small, but not nearly as scrawny as he had been when they had last seen him. His overall look was the same, though; dotted all over with freckles, with big doe eyes and a stupid puppy demeanor. Like all of the heroes, he now wore one of those _precious_ orange t-shirts that said 'Camp Half-Blood' on it, and a necklace of beads: one for every year in camp.

"Carlos," Uma greeted him, somehow sounding both stoic _and_ dramatic (It was a talent of hers.), while Harry and Gil made a big loop to close in from behind. "By the Fates, has it been four years already?"

Carlos looked around, startled to find that he was cornered, good and proper, but still answered, "More or...less. Hi, Uma. Harry."

Harry grinned ferociously (a years-old grudge now needling at him, hard, like an untended ember), and Carlos winced and looked away:

"What are you doing here? You can't get through the barrier."

"Funny enough, we actually know that," Uma said witheringly. "We're just here for our friends who can. You wouldn't mind handing us that backpack you're wearing, would you?"

"Are you _robbing_ me?" Carlos asked incredulously.

"No, we're collecting taxes on your good fortune," Uma replied. "Fortune requires sacrifice; the gods say so."

"Fork it over, Owl Boy," Harry prompted.

Carlos looked at each of them, then seemed to decide that complying was his best option; he let his backpack slide to the ground, then kicked it over to Uma.

"Great," Uma said. "You can go now."

The grudge in Harry's mind intensified, insisting that this was not enough payment for Carlos's crimes; he had _abandoned_ them, like all the others had. Harry growled, low but audible, and he saw Carlos's shoulders tense at the sound, but the boy didn't move to escape. So he had gotten _bolder_ since last they'd seen him.

"But it's been four years, like you said," Carlos answered, unable to quite keep the fear out of his tone as he tried to strike up a friendly conversation. "We should catch up. Who's your new friend? Is he cursed, too?"

Uma narrowed her eyes and beckoned Gil to stand beside her. "Don't try to pull your Athena tricks, Freckles."

"It's not a trick; I'm just curious," Carlos said.

"Go be 'curious' about the pony stables down in Camp Barf-Blood," Harry said, nudging Carlos with his hook to get him moving.

Feeling the pointed metal touch his back, Carlos jumped about a foot in the air and shuffled away from Harry, but he still didn't leave. _Much_ bolder, then. But there had to be a reason...

It seemed Uma had already figured it out: "You waiting on someone?"

Carlos blinked, and answered evenly, "Evie and Jay are on their way. They just stopped at the bottom of the hill to Mist some mortal cops who followed us."

Jay and Evie were coming, too? While Harry's more rational parts noted that this was about to become a much more even fight than they had planned for, he couldn't much focus on that because two other grudges were catching fire in his mind, and he kept on remembering the tussle, years ago, when he and Uma had realized that they were about to be left behind to fend for themselves, and, young and scared as they were, they had tried to stop it from happening, to stop the others from leaving. He remembered Jay had broken his arm, in the fight. Oh, he could repay that easily...

"Where are you guys coming back from?" Uma asked. Apparently, Carlos's statement hadn't blinded _her_ with thoughts of revenge, but rather made her curious. "Harry, take the backpack to our base, then come back," she added as a casual aside.

Getting the backpack away from the scene so the heroes didn't steal it back, _and_ getting Harry to take a walk so he didn't slit anybody's throat. That was their captain: always thinking.

Harry grabbed the bag roughly and trudged away, hearing the conversation fade behind him as he went:

"I went to see my mom," Carlos said.

"You saw Athena?" Gil gasped.

"No, my _mortal_ mom."

Then Harry couldn't hear anymore, because he was too far away. He vaguely remembered about Carlos's mortal mother. Some brilliant mind who had gone off the deep end when her intellectual peers introduced her to hard drugs or something. Harry had sort of assumed that she was dead by now; she'd been in poor health when Carlos first ran away, and crazy, too, off and on.

He crawled into their hidden base, and he deposited the stolen backpack. As soon as he was sure that everything was hidden from view, he sprinted back to the others and found that...

"Oh, well what do you know," he half-sang, taking out his hook again but not pointing it anywhere yet. "Evie and Jay have joined the fray."

He had intruded on a standoff; everyone had a weapon (or two, in Uma's case) pointed at someone, and Carlos had backed into the pine tree.

Evie and Jay took note of Harry's sudden appearance at the same time. They, too, had lost what scrawniness they'd had and were in the tacky orange shirts, with the bead necklaces, although Evie had tied a rubber band around part of her shirt so the excess fabric was out of the way and it looked marginally closer to complementary. Jay's hair was tied up in a bun, the better to use the bow and arrow that he had pointed at Gil (but that he was now moving to point at Harry instead), and Evie's was all tied back in a ponytail with tiny braids in the front that were tied back with the rest. _She_ wielded a sword (which was now pressed against the blade of one of Uma's knives) with a hilt that was so decorated (though not, he grudgingly noted, at the expense of grip) that she _had_ to have done it herself.

"Hello, Harry," Evie said, with a breezy tone but a no-nonsense look on her face.

 _"Charmed,"_ Harry said, but it was hard to keep up the aloof small talk because his eyes kept drifting back to Jay, and his mind kept telling him to attack and repay the old injury. He was not an animal; he knew how to ignore a grudge. Had to, even, in order to live his life instead of tracking down old preschool teachers. But this mixture of grudge with betrayal was potent, and the hitch was, he didn't really _want_ to fight it. He legitimately and without reservation believed that Jay deserved to have his arm broken, at a minimum, right now. Much as he anthropomorphized the grudges to better understand them, they were not some external force or some compulsion inflicted on him by a third party; they were parts of his mind, thoughts he had. Thoughts he _was_ having. "Jay."

"Harry," Jay said, flashing a brief cheeky smile because he probably just saw a scrappy boy itching for a fight and not a wildfire on two legs.

"You took something that doesn't belong to you," Evie said. "You should go get it and bring it back." She tried to push with her sword against Uma's knife to unsteady the captain's footing, but Uma was ready for it and only pushed back harder. (She had gotten _strong_ , Harry noticed.)

"'Fraid not though," Harry answered, gesturing with his hook. "Like we already told Carlos, we've got to tax your good fortune. We're pirates of the hill."

"So you're the ones who ambushed Chad and the others," Evie gathered.

"You had to know something like this was going to happen eventually," Carlos said, gesturing at the tense positions they were all in now.

Uma shrugged playfully. "I'm having fun. Aren't you having fun?"

"I'm having _buckets_ of fun," Harry said.

"Yeah," Gil agreed, wearing a contagious smile that Harry returned. Gil really floated above some of the worst things, and at times made Harry feel like he could float with him.

"What's the deal, guys?" Evie sighed, straightening slightly but not lowering her sword. "This is beneath you."

"It wasn't beneath _you_ to leave us to the monsters once you were safe and sound at camp," Uma said, and now _she_ pushed with her blade, but Evie was just as resilient. "Maybe no one knows what's beneath anyone."

"You're cursed," Carlos said, like they were being ridiculous. "What were we supposed to do?"

"I guess I don't know, Carlos," Uma said, with mock-intrigue. "I guess the question is, what _did_ you do?"

And Harry couldn't help himself, now; it was like he had been directly prompted. "Left us," he said, his voice coming out shrill. "Broke my arm. Never looked back. The purple-haired witch was just as cursed as we are, but _she_ got in because it's Hecate makes the barrier and it's Zeus makes the rules, and Zeus's golden boy wanted her in."

"That's not fair," Evie said lowly. "You heard Chiron and Mr. D say they couldn't make an exception for you. Mal had the gods' forgiveness through her mother and Ben. You didn't."

"Who are Chiron and Mr. D?" Gil asked.

Both Harry and Uma sent him an exasperated look.

"They're the camp counselors," Uma snapped. "One of them's god of wine, the other's half horse."

"Sounds like there's a lot of stuff you haven't told him," Evie noted.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Uma asked.

"It just sounds like you roped him into something he doesn't understand."

"I'm not roped in!" Gil protested.

"They're just trying to distract us, Gil; it's fine," Uma said.

"Gil," Carlos repeated. "So that's your name?"

Gil looked to Uma, as if unsure of whether to answer, and Uma grimaced at the mistake of giving them _any_ information, so Harry jumped in, "Aye. What's it to ya?"

"Do you always speak for him?"

"No," Harry shot back, and now Uma sent _him_ an exasperated look, and he belatedly realized that he was kind of proving their point.

"Uma's the captain," Gil said with conviction.

"'Captain'?" Jay repeated, snickering and earning back Harry's laser focus. He was laughing at them. Laughing at Uma. At her rank (that they had just made up a few days ago).

"That's right," Uma said. She slapped the flat of her second blade, the one that wasn't locked with Evie's, down on his arrow, taking his aim off of Harry.

Harry's restraint was instantly gone, and he ran at Jay.

"Harry!" Uma called out in shock.

"Don't!" Evie yelled, and the dam burst; they were _all_ battling. Harry saw Carlos and Evie crisscross paths so that Evie was taking on Gil and Carlos was taking on Uma, and then Harry drove his elbow into Jay's jaw and could see nothing else except the fight he was currently in.

Jay punched him in the eye, threw his bow aside (It wasn't going to be much help to him in close-range combat.) in the split second Harry took to recover, and swiftly brought out a dagger to deflect Harry's hook. They fought with blades, then, clanging them off each other, landing shallow hits and skims on skin in-between and during parries.

At some point in the struggle, Gil cried out in pain, and Harry's head reflexively turned to see if he was okay. Jay knocked the hook out of his hand and punched him in the same eye again.

"Let's stop, okay!" Evie shrieked. "Everybody, stop!"

The sounds of battle went quiet, but Harry didn't stop hitting Jay with his elbows and fists until Uma ground out, "Harry."

He stilled, then he rose and stood beside her.

Gil was on Uma's other side, barely managing to stay upright because he was bleeding from a gash in his leg. Evie's ponytail had come undone, but she looked unharmed. Gil's blood was on her sword, which was a new crime that she had committed against them. Uma had sustained a small cut on the back of her forearm, another crime. Carlos and Jay (and, from the way he felt, Harry himself) were covered in small cuts and spots that would bruise, but nothing major. Except for Harry's eye, which singularly felt like a bus had run into it.

"We don't have to hurt each other; a backpack's not worth it," Evie said soberly. She reached into her pocket and dug out something that Harry would probably have been able to see better if his eye weren't swelling. "Here, Gil; ambrosia, for your leg."

Gil took the ambrosia from her, but he offered it to Uma instead.

"It's yours, Gil; I don't need ambrosia, remember?" She was using her flat, low-tide voice. Harry noticed how tightly her hands gripped the hilts of her blades, even with her arm injury, and realized that she was either going to tear someone apart or burst into tears, but whichever it was, it was going to happen in under five minutes.

Gil offered the ambrosia to Harry next, who could only offer a slightly-dazed, "Take it and heal yourself. Hades, you're bleeding out."

Finally, Gil swallowed the ambrosia.

"We're going to go," Evie said. 

Then she, Carlos, and Jay silently padded down to camp.

The pirates watched the heroes leave in silence. Even once they had disappeared, they were silent for a little while. Long enough for Harry to start actually _feeling_ , in a real way, the tiny stings all over his body. He felt tired, and his internal scoreboard nagged dully that the ones who had wronged them, wronged them _again_ now, were out of reach.

That hadn't been a failure, not a defeat, but it didn't feel like a victory, either.

"They're going to rat us out," he said to break the silence.

"You started that," Uma said.

He looked at her sideways, unsure if she was accusing him of some kind of mutiny or just offering up an observation. Erring on the side of tact, he said, "Sorry."

Uma shrugged wearily. "I get it."

"Are you okay?" Gil asked.

"You need to get off that leg," Uma told him. "Harry, get him to base."

"Where are _you_ going, then?" he asked, even though he knew.

"To the water," she answered, and she sounded so _tired_. "I'll be back soon."

He wanted to tell her that he was worried about her going off alone, in her state, but Uma usually knew what was best for herself, and he didn't think she would take such a sentiment well right now. So he watched her trudge away, and he offered Gil his arm so he didn't wobble so much on his feet. 

"Let me know if I'm walking too fast, alright?"

Gil nodded, sagging a little against him.

Harry tried to spit down the hill at the stupid eye-sore of a camp, but his spit only hit the barrier and rolled down it sadly.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

"What are you lookin' at?" Uma murmured as she applied a paste to his swollen eye.

Harry picked a stray eyelash from her cheek and let out a puff of air to blow it away like a dandelion seed, then returned his gaze to her deep eyes. Sometimes it was like she contained oceans within her, unimaginable depths. "You could be a goddess yourself," he told her, not because he actually thought the Olympian pantheon was worthy of his captain, but because he didn't know other ways to verbalize the admiration he was feeling for her.

She chuckled. "No, I wouldn't be caught dead immortal." Her fingers glided over the injury one final time, and then she capped the paste and backed away satisfied.

Days had passed, and the bruise surrounding his eye had become an impressive multicolored display, at least as far as he had seen from the mirror in Chaddy Boy's compact.

They hadn't robbed anyone since Carlos; most everyone leaving camp seemed to be on guard, and anyway, they were laying low for a bit. Sort of.

"I think you're on the wrong end of that, Gilly," Harry observed.

Gil frowned, turned around the flute he was trying to play, stolen from a camper, and tried blowing into the other end. The sound was noticeably more musical. "Ohhh."

Harry chuckled.

"I think it's gonna be a lake day," Uma said, standing and stretching. "I need to wash my hair."

"I'll help!" Gil volunteered before Harry could even say anything, and he hopped to his feet.

Harry smirked but stood as well. Of _course_ they were going to help.

The three of them were cautious, but not _too_ cautious, as they made their way through the woods. The lake was on the other side of the magical pine tree. They halted mid-pace when they saw a child, about their age but gaunter and dirty with torn clothes, limping up to the tree. This wasn't a first; they'd just wait for the kid to pass.

They watched the emotional metamorphosis take place as the child beheld the camp; strain turned to wonder and hope. All that rubbish.

But as the stranger made to walk down the hill, something stopped them. The barrier.

They watched the stranger slam the palms of their hands into the invisible wall insistently, and then their fists, until all that was left for them was to shout "Hello?! Somebody let me in! My ankle...!"

The stranger fell back onto their behind. They cuffed their left pant leg up in order to examine a twisted ankle and a badly swollen foot and lower leg. They let out a shaky breath.

Uma strode from the trees, then, and Harry should have expected that.

"That needs ambrosia," she told the almost-crying child.

The child looked up at Uma, scared but hopeful. "Can you help me get into camp?"

"You can't get in," Uma said. "I can help heal that, though." She turned to speak to them over her shoulder: "Gil, hand me the ambrosia."

Gil emerged from the trees, then, slowly, and fished the ambrosia out of their bag. Harry hung back until Uma nodded that he should come out, too. The stranger's eyes darted between them with slight alarm.

"We're not monsters," Uma preempted any questions. "We're like you. Cursed." She handed the child a square of ambrosia.

"Cursed?" the child repeated, holding the ambrosia in the palm of her (It was a girl, Harry suspected.) hand but not ingesting it. She looked of Asian descent, with short black hair and wearing a raggedy dress with pants. Naturally, she was sweating.

"Eat it," Uma instructed. "I mean, if you're a demigod. Are you a demigod?"

The girl jutted her chin out daringly. "My dad is Hermes."

"Sounds about right; he gets around," Harry muttered.

Ignoring him, and seemingly to prove herself, the girl gulped down the ambrosia square in one swallow, then glared around at all of them. "Why can't I get into camp?"

"That's what the curse is; you can't get in." Uma explained more; she explained _why_ curses happened and what they meant in the long term, and the girl's glare turned into a frown:

"And you guys are cursed?"

In answer, Uma leaned back against the barrier like it was any solid thing. "All of us," she said.

"And...they make you stay out here?"

Uma grinned, then, and Harry grinned, too. "No, that was a choice. They actually want us to leave."

"We're pirates," Gil said proudly.

"For a while we just kept moving to avoid monster attacks, but we decided to settle here and rob the campers coming or going. It means we end up with the monster attacks they run from, and sometimes robbing them gets us in some scrapes, but other than that it's a pretty calm gig." Uma's tone was also full of pride.

"Alright." The girl nodded like a decision had been made. "I wanna be a pirate, too."

"No," Harry protested immediately.

The girl didn't take this as a defeat, though, as she seemed to have gathered that Uma was in charge. And Uma was thinking.

She didn't think too long. "No," she finally said. "We don't know you that well."

But Harry could tell it was a test to see what the girl would do or say.

"I have nowhere else to go," she pleaded. "And with my ankle, I'll get killed on my own!"

"You could wait for a camper to come out, tell them you saw the pirates, see if they'll have mercy on you." (It wouldn't work, but that wasn't the point.)

"I'm not gonna rat you guys out. Please let me stay with you."

Uma thought about it for another few seconds, looked the girl over for any signs of insincerity, exchanged glances with Harry (now resigned) and Gil (openly hopeful), then said, "You don't have to beg; I just needed to know you wouldn't betray us at the first opportunity."

"And you'd better not, too," Harry added.

The girl nodded firmly, excited determination etched into her face.

"What's your name?" Uma asked.

"Desiree," the girl responded.

"Well, Desiree..." Uma took out one of her knives and laid the flat of it lightly on Desiree's right shoulder, then her left. "...Welcome to the pirate crew."


	3. Yoinked and Yeeted (I'm Sorry, I'm So Sorry)

It didn't take long for the campers to give their answer to the plague of pirates. Apparently, that answer was to recruit the _trees themselves_ to retaliate.

Typical.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The day Uma and her boys got Desiree was a lake day, as intended; they led the semi-stranger back to their hidden base to sleep (since apparently she was exhausted) and then left her there to make good on their original plans. Uma still needed to wash her hair, after all, and still craved her time with what couldn't more clearly be her element, and this served the double-function of testing Desiree again, to see if she would make a break for it with what stolen goods were left there. Gil had their main backpack, so the things left behind could be lost without much trouble to them. And anyway, it was best to know early on if Desiree was a liar.

As soon as the three of them were out of earshot from Desiree, Harry was saying, "I don't know about this."

Uma nodded vaguely. She could understand, after all; her mind was full of reasons not to trust Desiree, and her heart was full of reasons that things were perfect with just Harry and Gil. But the counterarguments that were also in her heart and mind were too much to ignore. _Man, stuff used to be simple, didn't it?_

No, not really.

"I think she seems nice," Gil chimed in.

Uma smiled a little. At least Harry and Gil were just as split on this as she was.

"She seems stubborn," Harry said, ruffling at his own hair. He did that when he was agitated. Then again, Harry channeled a lot of different feelings through touching his hair.

"Imagine that," Uma interjected pointedly.

"She, she attached herself to us too fast," Harry said. "You trust that?"

"Not really." Uma shrugged.

"I attached to you pretty fast," Gil pointed out.

"We were kids," Harry dismissed.

"We're _still_ kids," Gil said, frowning.

Uma cleared her throat, and Harry, who had been about to say something, closed his mouth and looked to her expectantly. "Fact is, I _don't_ trust her," she said. "But, she's like us. We got turned away at the door, too, but none of _us_ were alone when it happened. I can't let someone like us be alone. That would make us like Them." She nodded her head in the direction of Camp Half-Blood. "And I can't...be like them." She met Harry's eyes; they shared a gaze of matching intensity, and she could tell that he saw how deeply she meant her words.

Gil was eager to say, "Exactly!"

Harry worked his jaw for a second before grudgingly nodding. "I'll back whatever you decide. If she betrays us or gets either of you hurt, I'll kill 'er."

"If she betrays us, I'll probably put you in charge of vengeance," Uma told him dryly.

"Who else?" Harry agreed with a smirk.

"And," Uma added, "if she gets _you_ hurt, I'll drown her. Without a doubt."

This cheered Harry up possibly more than anything else had, and then they arrived at the lake and things were normal again for a few hours.

When they returned to base, it was dim out, Uma's hair was damp and plaited, the boys' hair was damp and combed (Uma was pleased to note that the relaxed smile still lingered on Harry's face from having her comb his hair.), and Desiree was still asleep and shaking like she was having a nightmare. Uma nudged her awake with her foot so that she could have dinner with them, and Desiree, still pink-eyed and heavy with sleep, licked her lips like a house cat and sat up without a word. They shared a rather large can of beans, passing it from person to person until it was empty. Nobody spoke until the beans were gone. Not even Gil; he had his priorities just like all of them.

Once they tossed the emptied can into their garbage pile, though, Desiree immediately asked, "So when do we steal? What do I do?"

Uma sat back and said what she'd been thinking through the whole of their silent meal: "I think we'll start up again tomorrow."

"Good; we're out of Chad's mints," Gil said excitedly.

"Desiree, can you climb a tree?" Uma asked.

"Are you kidding?" Desiree replied, with a grin that suggested she had a multitude of tree climbing stories.

"While we do the actual ambush part, you keep a look out from the top of a tree to make sure that there are no reinforcements for the target on their way. Keep a look out in every direction, got it?"

Both Desiree and Harry nodded, Desiree in confirmation that she understood her role, and Harry in appreciation for Uma's idea. This should help to keep them out of scraps like the one they'd gotten into with Carlos and the rest.

"I hope they have more chocolate," Gil said. "But now we have to split it four ways."

"Still three; I'm allergic to chocolate," Desiree said, which put a smile on Gil's face.

Uma told Gil to keep watch, that night, and slept close to Harry. Well, their heads, knees, and feet were close; between their stomachs, Harry stowed his hook, so that either of them could grab it if they woke up suddenly in need of a weapon.

Desiree curled up somewhere behind Uma, and Harry's eyes darted to her whenever she yawned, stretched, or moved in any way.

Uma hummed part of a lullaby to get him to relax, and then she fell asleep.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The day _after_ they got Desiree, they started pirating again.

Everyone returned to their role, plus Desiree in the tree. The target was a lanky girl who looked about to fight back until she saw that there were three of them (Desiree being out of sight), at which point she dropped her bag to the ground and fled.

They returned to base at a run, Desiree waving her arms over her head jubilantly, and Harry and Gil 'whoop'ed with joy even though that was pretty counterproductive to keeping their hidden campsite hidden, and Uma didn't tell them to quit it, because it _did_ feel good to be at it again. It felt free, and it felt like the Fates weren't just jerking them around all the time; _they_ could be their own Fates. That was how it felt.

She stomped the ground as she ran, half-expecting it to quake, and she laughed with them.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The morning after that was when the trees started attacking.

Harry was up guarding, so Uma and Gil were awoken not so much by the tree roots writhing in the ground beneath them, which certainly was happening but which hadn't gotten bad enough to fully alert them, but rather by Harry physically pulling them to their feet and out of the way. Uma's eyesight was blurry for half a second, and then she was shouting, "Desiree!" because the tree roots seemed about to wind, tentacle-like, around their new companion's ankles.

Desiree awoke and scrambled to her feet, now only with a _slight_ limp remaining. She hopped over a swiping tree root like she was skipping rope, then rushed over to stand beside Uma. "What's going on?" she asked, not looking at anyone except Uma. (Was Uma going to have to actively _tell_ her that it was okay to listen to Harry or Gil, too?)

"Dryads," Uma growled when she saw a woman's face peering at her from the bark of one of the trees. _"Come out and show yourself!"_

There was only a moment's pause before the whole line of trees in front of them spewed out lithe, nonhuman women, some with their arms crossed or their hands on their hips, all with very serious expressions.

Harry and Desiree both readied their weapons (his hook, in Harry's case, and in Desiree's case a long stick) for a potential fight, but Uma held her hand up for caution. Too many, too powerful. They'd attack if they had to, but not _until_ they had to.

"Take this as a final warning, cursed-borns," the dryad most directly across from them, possibly the oldest (as she looked middle-aged), stated.

"That's not our names," Uma said firmly.

"Your kind are barred from Camp Half-Blood's protection, as well as from the bounty of its residents. Leave or be punished."

"It's not against the rules for us to stay _outside_ the camp," Uma protested, "and the gods never said we couldn't take anything from campers! We're doing the work of Hermes and Nemesis."

"When you quarrel with the camp, the camp quarrels back," the dryad said.

"Their quarrels are our quarrels," another added.

"Their foes our foes," another finished.

"Consider me a foe, then," Uma said, balling her fists. "We're not leaving."

A tree tendril swung towards Uma to knock her off her feet, but she ducked it.

Harry growled, pointing his hook at several of the (many) dryads in turn. "Watch where you're swinging!"

An answering tendril clotheslined him. Uma dove to help him up but was knocked aside by another tendril, and as soon as she hit the ground, tree roots pinned her arms to her sides and bound her ankles together. She wriggled to no avail, only able to watch as Harry grunted through the same dilemma. Desiree shouted as her fighting stick started to sprout branches that gripped her fingers and wrists tightly so that both of her hands were locked painfully to it, and then she, too, was thrown to the ground by a freaking tree and cocooned by roots.

Gil was the only one who manage to keep on his feet, dodging roots in a chaotic jig and even catching the branch that tried to knock him over with his bare hands. Unfortunately, that move resulted in the branch gripping _him_ the way Desiree's fighting stick had gripped her, and while he was hopelessly attached, the tree flung him away into the sky.

"Gil!" Uma shouted. (Harry was facedown and didn't see.)

Then the same happened to her; the snakes of wood that kept her bound suddenly hoisted her into the air, then threw her.

For a second, Uma was only stunned as she sailed through the air. Then the terror started to creep while her upward and forward momentum still outweighed gravity. But when gravity started to regain influence, her terror turned to wild panic.

That was when she started to yell, her heart in her throat and her lungs burning and her eyes watering from the air moving past her face.

She was going to die. Definitely, she was going to die. The fall would kill her, wouldn't it? She didn't suppose the dryads would have made precautions so they weren't murdering eleven-year-olds; not when they had given their "warning". She was powerless.

Then she heard more screams: Harry and Desiree, falling with her, and Gil just slightly ahead. A different kind of fear chased out the original.

Her people. Her friends. Her...family.

_Not them! No!_

A sort of heat started to build up between her ears, a hot refusal. They weren't going to die. _We will NOT._ She wouldn't allow it. She was pure raw power, and she would not die. They would not die. If the Fates thought they were going to cut their strings, those witches could go straight to Tartarus.

The denials built and tangled together in her skull so that they stopped being words and instead became a ball of hot certainty, growing as time seemed to slow down, and her eyes closed of their own accord, trapping the heat inside.

It was dark, and her head was ablaze, and time was moving so slowly that she couldn't even feel the fall anymore.

In midair, she passed out.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

She dreamed that she was in a place where she had never been before.

She was lying at the edge of a lake, with the water lapping at her feet and shins, all the way up to her knees. The sun was shining gently, and the air was rich with the smell of fresh fruit and the sound of naiads (water nymphs) splashing and playing.

Uma stood up, but she couldn't feel the ground under her feet or hear even the tiniest splash to indicate that she was actually disturbing the water. She _could_ feel the absence of the familiar weight around her hips; her knives were gone, every last one. Which, even though this was a dream, she didn't love.

Turning away from the lake, she saw a spread of cabins, an archery range, a stables full of whinnying sounds... _Oh._ If she was seeing Camp Half-Blood from the inside for the first time in her life, this was no ordinary dream. She ground her teeth wondering who would show her this. Was it out of cruelty? Or did one of the gods think they were being kind...? No, it had to be cruelty; the gods were never nice to them.

Still, Uma was never one to fail to use a situation to her advantage; she forged ahead. Maybe the dream would let her get some vandalism done before pulling her back into reality. She didn't think much about the fact that her feet didn't touch the ground as she walked until she tried to push past a cluster of older girls and found that she couldn't touch them either. Her arms just passed through them, like she was liquid or a ghost.

Then there was a laugh behind her, and it was so primordially strange-sounding that she honestly couldn't tell anything about the voice except that it wasn't human. It was _not_ human.

Uma bit back her apprehension and turned on her heels, determined to face whatever was laughing at her, but no matter how many times she turned, it was always behind her. She felt a pair of hands land on her shoulders after about four tries, and despite herself she went completely still and lost every ounce of tension in her body.

 _"Little thing, so full of...zeal,"_ the voice cooed to her, like she was an infant (which she had trouble disproving when her muscles were this slack). _"Don't be so hasty. Time is on your side. All things have their age."_

She felt so small. Absolutely tiny, in the scheme of things. But that was an illusion, like all of it was an illusion, and her mind belonged to _her_. She would not be small in her own mind.

Mentally, she punched and kicked at the illusion, at these false senses ( _Notrealnotrealnotrealnotreal!!!_ ), until it started to shimmer, then shatter.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Uma woke up on the ground, but her eyes didn't open; her head was pounding more sharply and intensely than it ever had in her life, and it felt like her eyelids were fused together. 

She remembered sneaking over to Harry's house one morning when they were very young and her mother was either trying to "divine" from television static or trying to "brew potions" out of shampoo and whatever was expired in their fridge or pantry. (She had stopped being able to tell magic from foolishness long ago. It caused her intense physical pain to even say the _word_ "magic", but trying to recreate her past glory in sorcery was seemingly her only pastime.) Harry's house had been dark, almost pitch black, because James Hook had been nursing a massive hangover and ordered that no one let any sunlight in. (Harry had still opened the window to let her in, despite his older sister's whispered protests, and his father, two rooms away, had been none the wiser.)

In this moment, though she never would have predicted it, she empathized with James Hook a bit. With this headache, she didn't mind so much that her eyelids were taking a break from functioning. The sun would surely kill her.

"Get back, I said!" a voice to her right- Harry, she knew even with her skull splitting in half -commanded someone.

"She needs water, doesn't she?" That responding voice had to be (What was her name again? Gods...) _Desiree_.

Uma's wits returned to her sluggishly. She couldn't quite remember what had led up to this; it was hard enough keeping the memory of her dream from escaping through her fingers. Letting them know that she was awake didn't even occur to her; speaking was too much vibration for her head to handle.

"Like we said, we can't get to the lake except through the trees, and we don't want to move her too far because it hurts her whenever we try to pick her up."

"I've got water."

(The sound of water sloshing around in a plastic bottle caused Uma's ears to perk up. Every part of her cried out, _Yes, that! We need that!)_

"Styx, bring it over," Harry said, as if reading Uma's mind.

Desiree came closer, and she must have passed the bottle to Harry, because when the first drops of water were drizzled over Uma, they came from Harry's direction. It wasn't the sea, but it was something, and Uma drew whatever tiny bits of healing it offered directly into her, taking the edge off of her headache, her weariness in general, little by little.

"Where did you get this?" Harry asked Desiree.

"Stole it from the convenience store back that way," Desiree said.

"Convenience store's too far; no way you were there and back," Harry protested.

"I'm quick on my feet, when I need to be," Desiree told him. "Daughter of Hermes."

Uma opened her eyes, and Harry exhaled hard, as if he'd been holding his breath since she went under.

"Where's Gil?" she croaked out.

Harry handed her the water bottle (and she _downed_ the last of its contents in one gulp). "Gone to see if there's a hole or crack in the wall," he said gravely. "How do you feel?"

"The 'wall'?" Uma repeated, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

"How do you feel?" Harry repeated, just as stubborn as she was, when he wanted to be.

"Like the inside of my skull is covered in thumb tacks," she answered, but she said it absently because she had just noticed the "wall" to which he was referring.

They were at the edge of the forests leading up to Half-Blood Hill, and the outermost trees had formed a thick barrier from their own woodery, twisted and seemingly impenetrable. A wall to protect the other wall.

Uma stood up and appraised the monstrosity. Her thoughts raced: what now? If Gil came back saying there was no way in, how did they proceed from there? They couldn't quit and let Them _win_. It was out of the question. It would probably make Harry physically ill, at this point, and besides that, wars didn't end when the opposition _started_. No. This was not over.

"You saved us," Desiree said, and Uma jumped a little because, in her contemplation, she had not noticed that Desiree and Harry had come to stand on either side of her.

"Did I?" Uma inquired. "I slept through that part; what happened?"

"I don't know, but it was like we were all suddenly wrapped up in water; it caught us and set us down gently," Desiree rambled enthusiastically. "The grass is still wet. Well, except there..."

Uma's eyes followed Desiree's gesture, and she found that the grass where she had been laying (and _only_ where she had been laying) was bone dry, even brown). She sarcastically wolf-whistled at the weirdness, then turned to Harry to find that, now that the worry had passed, he was looking at her with awe and wonder, his eyes wide. (A part of her that was still weighed down by having thought about her mother, a part that hungered to be important and loved, consumed that look hungrily, but she didn't have time to feel.)

She shoved at his shoulder, saying "Shut up," even though he hadn't said anything, and he broke into his normal grin.

"It was well braw, until you scared the crap out of all of us," he said, his accent thickening a bit like it always did when he was in high emotions. "I already expected you to pass out, but then when I tried to pick you up you started greetin' like I stabbed you." The note of worry started bleeding back into his tone as he spoke, so Uma joked:

"I've been stabbed before; that headache was worse." She laid her hand on Harry's shoulder, then turned to Desiree. "Thanks for the water."

"Gotta help my captain," she answered. "You've saved my life twice now."

Uma looked again at Harry and found that he was eyeing Desiree with something like acceptance. _Well, what do you know: Some good out of this mess._ Her heart felt like it was expanding, as she allowed herself to fully believe that she had Desiree's loyalty.

"Uma!" Before she could even fully process his approach, Gil had near-tackled her in a hug, and her head swam. "You're alright!"

"Careful, you chancer," Harry protested as Uma struggled to maintain her footing.

"Is there a way in?" Uma asked dizzily.

"No." Gil took a step back, allowing Uma to breathe. "It's thick all over. I couldn't even hack it apart."

Uma's gaze returned to the forest. "Our bags are in there, aren't they?"

"Aye," Harry said darkly.

Uma crossed her arms. "That's our matches, extra rope, food..."

"We could steal more," Desiree said.

Uma smiled mirthlessly, then walked as close to the woods as she could. (Harry and Desiree followed her closely.)

She didn't know what she was going to do; she only knew that she was sick of them being the only ones whose actions had consequences.

"I am Uma, daughter of Poseidon," she said, loudly but not shouting, and to no one in particular. Still, it felt like the universe was listening. "Daughter of the sea and of Ursula the Sorceress, enemy of heartless heroes. I curse the dryads of Half-Blood Hill for harming my crew. May the rain never fall on their soil until they allow us in!" She made a gesture that she had learned from her mother (meaning it could have been masterful witchcraft or completely meaningless for all she knew) and then turned away from the trees with an air of finality. That was that. "See how _you_ like starving," she muttered.

"D'you think that'll work?" Harry asked skeptically.

"Either it does or it doesn't," Uma shrugged. "We need to find a place to sleep. Somewhere close enough that we can watch the wall, but not out in the open. We're too exposed, right here." She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead; the pain was bearable, now, but it was distracting nonetheless. For once, she wished that they had ambrosia.

"Are we still pirates?" Desiree asked softly.

"Always," Uma said with a smirk. She clapped Harry on the back. "First mate." Then Gil. "Second mate." Desiree. "Third...mate." Sure. Why not? "Let's move."

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

After several long walks along the border of the forest, and over the course of a few days, Uma was almost entirely sure of two things: that the soil around the trees was drying faster than normal, and that the campers were not being allowed through the outermost trees any more than they were.

"They trapped themselves in," Harry said gleefully at dinner one day.

Uma sighed. "They probably have other ways out, Harry."

"Like what?"

"Like tunnels, maybe. Hades, they might even fly over on their pegasi."

"Ooh, can we steal a pegasus?" Gil asked through a mouthful of thrown-away burger. (Crap of craps, they were back to eating garbage. They hadn't sunk that low since right after she and Harry were abandoned by Mal's posse.)

"I don't like horses," Desiree said, wrinkling her nose.

"How can you not like horses?" Gil asked.

"Cops ride horses; I don't like cops," Desiree said simply.

"It's not the horses' _fault_ , though," Uma felt the need to mention. "It's what they're trained for."

"But their freaky legs," Desiree protested.

"You can't, * _gulp_ *, hate someone because of their legs," Gil said while swallowing the last of his garbage burger.

"That'd be like if I said I hated you for your crooked teeth," Harry mocked, because poking fun was the last tier of acquaintanceship before actually becoming his friend. (It was a long one.)

"You're one to talk, Big Ears," Desiree retorted. ( _She's quick on the bounce-back,_ Uma observed, pleased.)

Gil balled up his wrapper and threw it onto the garbage pile. "And if we got a pegasus, we could fly over the monsters."

"Horses poo a _lot."_

The conversation proceeded from there, with Desiree adamantly anti-horse, Gil and Uma pro-horse, and Harry horse-ambivalent. It felt like the sort of thing normal kids would talk about, but then again Uma had very little frame of reference for "normal".

As they were settling into their places for the night (Desiree was up guarding, since she was trusted enough now, and Uma slept between Harry and Gil. They were all curled up, and Gil's head was already sinking to rest against her shoulder, his breath warm.), Uma idly said, "We should go to the movies one day. We could sneak in. Or to an amusement park."

Gil exhaled contentedly. "Rollercoasters?"

"I love rollercoasters," Desiree said.

Harry didn't say anything, but his gaze stayed locked with Uma's. Like he understood exactly what was going on in her mind: the desire for something denied them. It felt so good to be understood.

"Oh," Gil gasped out of nowhere. "And cotton candy!"

Uma and Harry both broke into tired chuckles.

"Whatever you like, sunshine," Harry sighed.

Gil said something that was unintelligible because his face was against Uma's arm.

Uma elbowed him lightly. "What?"

Raising his head a little more, Gil repeated, "I can't be sunshine; Artemis is goddess of the moon."

"Moonshine, then," Harry said, and Uma chuckled again.

She was doing a lot of chuckling tonight.

_I must be really sleepy._

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The next day, as always, Uma ran the soil at the roots of the trees between her thumb and forefingers. It was bone dry, practically dust, and not a cloud in sight. Maybe it was her imagination, but the trees were already seeming gray around the edges.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The day after that, Harry and Desiree went out to steal food (It was a long walk for not-garbage.) and Uma patrolled the forest's edge with Gil.

"Do you think my mom ever watches me like Harry's mom watches him?" Gil asked her out of nowhere.

Uma looked over at her second mate. He was looking at his feet as he walked even though he had never once stumbled in the wilderness. (In the city, he was downright clumsy, but the woods and even woods-adjacent places like here were practically his habitat.) She could guess what kind of answer he wanted.

"Well, Artemis is the goddess of the wilderness and the hunt," Uma pointed out, tugging on Gil's sleeve to get him to look at her. "Could be that every bird and squirrel reports back to her. They tell her how nimble, strong, and loyal you are, and how much your friends care about you." She punched his arm to balance out the mushiness.

Gil smiled and punched her arm, too. "They tell her how much I love you guys." Gods, he was so sincere.

"Yeah, yeah," Uma smirked, even though every time someone said they loved her, it felt like her skin was humming a song.

Gil took in the state of the trees. "You really cursed them good," he observed. "I almost want to water them."

"They get no water til we get our bags and our spot back," Uma said, talking a bit loudly towards the end in case the dryads were listening. Then she kicked a tree trunk just for the satisfaction of it. "Dumb friggin trees."

There was a chortling sound behind them.

Both Uma and Gil pivoted abruptly, Uma reaching for her knives and Gil pushing Uma behind him. Before them stood a man dressed like a biker with near-opaque black sunglasses and biceps bigger than Uma's head.

Uma moved Gil from in front of her and advanced a few steps, her head tilting back from curiosity. This man was not human, definitely, and normally something like that would cause her apprehension, but right now her boldness and her defiance felt impossibly heightened, and it was almost tempting to challenge him.

"I've seen my share of half-bloods," the man said, "but you guys seem uniquely good at starting conflict."

"Is that right?" Uma replied.

"Yeah. And I like conflict." It seemed that there was a glow emanating from behind his glasses, as even from several feet away, Uma felt the heat of open flames. But the man's smile was easygoing.

"Are you the one from my dream?" Uma asked.

"I don't really do dreams; I'm more of an action guy."

"Who are you?"

"Names have power, sea child," the man scolded smugly.

"Only powerful names have power," Uma snarked.

Rather than chortle, this time, the man let out a booming laugh, and Uma was surprised when Gil cowered into her side, as if the noise had struck him to his core. She couldn't ask him what was wrong and risk drawing attention to his vulnerability. Instead, she stood up even straighter for him and tried to shield him with what little surface area she had.

"I will tell you, this has been a fun week, thanks to you," the man declared. "The dryads are pleading with Demeter, so Demeter's pissed with Poseidon for withholding the rain, and _Zeus_ is pissed with Poseidon for siding with you cursed-borns in the first place, Hera sides with Zeus, Hephaestus'll side with any underdog and Aphrodite adores your passion, so that's them on your side..." The man broke into a wide grin, possibly from the expression of bewilderment that had probably been on Uma's face before she thought to clear it.

"You're telling me the Olympians suddenly give that much of a crap?" she said breathlessly, feeling once again that terrible smallness. They were being observed from Olympus. Sides were being taken. Her father...She felt small.

"Hermes has a betting pool for how this plays out," the man said, with inappropriate glee. "I've got fifty drachmas and a goatskin on bloodshed; don't let me down."

Gil's hands tightened on Uma's shoulders.

"Who the Hades are you?" Uma asked, more heatedly than before.

"Careful; Hades actually doesn't hate you yet. I'm Ares," the man said. "God of war. You kids have earned a lot of attention from my family. You're practically all anyone is talking about, right now. I hope your future is worth all the build-up; so often half-bloods start off strong and then fizzle out. They grow up, get 'mature', decide they don't need war." His black sunglasses reddened, and the heat intensified, casting an orange glow on his face. " ** _Everybody_ needs war.** "

Gil was shaking.

"We're not interested in fighting for your entertainment," Uma said emphatically. "We didn't hear a word from any of you when we were weak and starving."

"A dying cursed-born is a dime a dozen," Ares said pitilessly, "but cursed-borns who fight back? As rare as a tailless centaur."

"What did you come talk to us for?" Uma demanded.

"Sometimes you gotta grease the wheels to keep them spinning," Ares said.

"What does _that_ mean?" Uma asked.

"That I've said all I want to. Now look away, before my True Form burns your eyeballs out."

"Is that what happened to _your_ eyes?" Uma asked, while turning away and making sure Gil did the same (He had no problem there.).

Another laugh was the only answer as a bright light filled the space and the god of war disappeared.

Uma blinked as her eyes adjusted back to the more moderate light, and Gil slumped back against the wall of twisted tree branches as soon as Ares was gone.

"Are you okay?" Uma asked him, and she was surprised to find that _she_ was starting to shake, now, as well. In Ares's absence, she no longer felt quite so much the defiant need to fight back, and some of the terror caught up with her now.

"H-he just..." Gil looked white as a sheet.

"Sit down," Uma urged him, grabbing his arms and easing him to the ground. "You don't have to say anything. Just breathe; he's gone now."

Gil sat down with his knees bent and just breathed for a few seconds. The only times Uma ever saw him this shaken were when he woke up, sweat-plastered, from some nightmare. 

(She had learned to notice when he slept too still; his nightmares petrified him. He was unlike Harry in that way. It had taken a while, when they were little, for Harry to train himself not to wake up swinging whenever he had a nightmare. Uma counted herself lucky that Harry hadn't yet had his hook in those days; the worst she had ever gotten was scratched or kicked in the stomach before Harry came to his senses and started apologizing profusely.)

"He just reminded me of my dad," Gil said weakly.

Uma raked her hand through his hair. He didn't instantly start to relax like Harry probably would have, but he did lean into it, almost like a puppy. "I'm here," she said. "You know I won't let anyone hurt you, right?"

"Just don't tell Harry I chickened out," Gil said, sniffing. "I don't want him to know I...I wasn't protecting you."

"Harry would kill for you, and you know that," Uma said firmly. "He won't hold this against you. Sometimes you protect me, sometimes I protect you, and same with Harry. Right?"

"Right," Gil agreed quietly.

"Are you okay?" Uma asked again. Her hand was still in his hair.

"Better," Gil said. "Do we keep walking now?"

"Harry and Desiree should be close now; let's get back. You can drink some water, rest up a little..."

Gil nodded gratefully.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

As soon as Harry heard their story- or the gist, anyway -and saw Gil's state (recovering, but still pale and shaking), he was off on a tirade of mixed shock, pride that they were so ferocious that even the "bloody Olympians" took notice, and rage at how their well-being was dismissed. At a point, he went so far as to say he'd _kill_ the god of war. It wasn't outside the realm of things they normally growled out when they were mad or frustrated, but this time Uma felt a bizarre urge to tell him to knock it off, or to be quieter at least.

Had those Olympians actually scared her? Had that been the point?

She looked over at Harry, pacing and ranting, and at Gil, whose head was in her lap, now, as he seemed either asleep or near-asleep, and at Desiree, who sat off to the side, lining up their food haul and then working a can open for dinner.

Friends. Family. Crew.

She was not scared; she would stay strong, for them.

She interrupted Harry's still-ongoing flow of daring words to say that she would take first watch for the night.

It was a perfectly normal thing to say, but Harry frowned suspiciously, dropped into a squat in front of her, and asked, "And _you're_ alright, are you?"

"I'm fine," she said.

"You don't seem fine," Harry replied lowly. "I know that look."

Uma kept her conviction for a few seconds more, then relented, sighing and resting her forehead against his. "It's crazy that they're actually watching us," she murmured. "It feels...more dangerous. Like everything was just words before and now it's all real."

Harry slowly looped one of her plaits around his finger, unlooped, then looped it again. "They're just full of hot air, Olympian or not. They'll watch, but they never do anything."

"Ares spoke to _me,"_ Uma said, lifting her head from his but not moving back very far.

"I'll take first watch," Harry said. "You get some rest, love."

She was about to protest, but then Desiree said, "Uma?" and crawled up to them sheepishly.

"What is it?"

Desiree reached into her pocket and pulled out several balled-up dollar bills. "I stole this for you, too," she said, with a look in her eyes like she was waiting for approval.

Uma's eyes widened, and she scanned the money to take a quick count. "Thirty-three dollars?! Nice one, Desi!"

Desiree grinned at the praise.

"We could actually _pay_ for things." Uma was ashamed that her mind went immediately to movie theaters and theme parks instead of things like multivitamins, camping equipment, or a bra that still fit. But they could steal _those_ things; a theme park would be so hard to sneak into. "We'll save it," she decided, though it pained her a little to wait. "Like we're saving the drachmas."

"What will we buy, when we have enough?" Desiree asked.

"I don't know," Uma said. "But it'll be great." She meant it, and they could tell that she meant it. Greatness was always the intention.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

In the end, after a dinner of potato soup, Harry convinced Uma to let him guard.

She fell asleep shortly; it felt like seconds after her eyes closed that she found herself once again in a dream. This one did not take place in Camp Half-Blood, but in another place that she had never seen before: a palace overlooking what seemed to be all of New York City _and_ all of the world at the same time, like the image of the cityscape and the globe were superimposed on each other. The sight annoyed Uma's eyes, so she looked away from it to take in the statues of gods and goddesses, and the little temples.

"Is this Mount Olympus?" she whispered.

_"What do you think, little demigod?"_

She almost wasn't surprised that the inhuman voice had accompanied her here, as well. It still seemed to come from somewhere behind her, but she didn't bother turning for it. "Who are you? Why are you showing me this?"

_"Why do you suppose?"_

"I got out of one dream; I can get out of this one, too, if you keep wasting my time."

There was no answer.

Uma sighed and tried to walk through this Dream Olympus. Again, her feet weren't touching the floor, but it didn't hinder her progress; she strode through the strange space.

 _"If your hope is to bore me into answering,"_ the voice finally said, _"then I am afraid your hopes are misplaced. Immortals are notoriously patient."_

"That's why immortals don't get anything done," Uma returned snarkily (whilst mentally pocketing the fact that it was at least confirmed her weird dream conductor entity was some kind of immortal).

There was a noticeably briefer silence before the voice answered back, _"Clever little thing, aren't you?"_

"That's not my name," Uma said.

A fireplace near the walls of the huge palatial foyer-like space caught her attention for some reason. She felt drawn to it; she approached it, slowly, as if she might scare away the fire or something stupid like that.

 _"Then what is your name?"_ the voice asked, sounding amused, but more than that, sounding quieter than before, as if in walking closer to the fire she had actually finally managed to change the voice's position in relation to her, or hers in relation to it.

"Names have power," Uma said back, kneeling down when she reached the hearth. There was a fire, albeit burning lowly, but she couldn't feel the warmth that it was supposed to be giving off. She didn't feel any differently than she had on the other side of the room. "You may call me 'Captain'."

The voice, rather than laughing as she had expected it to, made a sound of acknowledgement, sounding even farther away.

Uma couldn't be bothered to think much on that, though; irked beyond reason by the unwarm flames, she tried to hold her hands closer, even though of course it made no difference. She didn't even know _why_ she so hungered for the fire's warmth all of a sudden, but even still she waved a hand through the fire itself as a last resort, and she was surprised when it burned her just as sharply (and realistically) as a normal fire would.

It pulled her abruptly from the dream.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

She woke up to excited voices:

"Uma!"

"Uma, wake up! The wall's gone!"

"Uma, we won!"

She couldn't process the words, because the first priority her brain could form was that the pain in her hand from the dream fire was still there, as real as an actual injury. Uma sat up gingerly to examine the hand and found, clutched in it, a dark lump of rock that she was certain she had not been carrying before.

"Uma." Harry's face was right in front of hers, suddenly. "The heckin' dryads gave in! We can go back to our base, now, and to pirating!"

Uma finally registered what they were telling her. She rose to her feet, looking out at the unobstructed forest. "We need to get our bags back, then," she said at last, pocketing what she was almost certain was a coal from the fire of Olympus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, thank you for the great comments and messages! Long comments are my lifeblood.
> 
> I accept fanfic commissions, btw, at my Tumblr: https://amityravenclawelf.tumblr.com  
> Just message me! :D
> 
> And as always, please PLEASE comment!


	4. Acquisition and Opposition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brief abuse mentions in this chapter! Like, super brief (within the span of individual sentences), and the characters are sort of blasé about it. Just warning you guys!

"So we just let them back in?" Mal crossed her arms. The Head Counselors of every cabin were meeting with Chiron in the Big House of Camp Half-Blood, as they were doing increasingly often, now.

Chiron spread his hands. "Lord Poseidon has cursed the dryads with no rain until his daughter is allowed to settle back on the hill with her co-conspirators. To refuse would be to antagonize the dryads and an elder god."

"They're robbing us," Mal insisted, because this was ridiculous. "We're supposed to just _take_ it?"

Some of the other Head Counselors seemed to be on her side, which was why Mal was surprised to find her friends (except for Jay) and boyfriend (Yes, she could have a boyfriend at age twelve.) looking somewhat strained.

"They...seemed to need the stuff more than we do," Evie said, hesitant towards the beginning but then sitting up straight and finishing with her usual breezy candor. She flicked her blue-tinted ponytail back over her shoulder. "They were really thin. And their clothes barely fit."

"It's not our fault they're cursed," Mal insisted.

"To be fair, you're cursed too," Jay said flatly. (He wasn't Head Counselor of his cabin, but they had allowed him in anyway because he personally knew Uma and the rest. Same with Carlos.)

Mal shot him a dirty look. "I'm forgiven by Zeus, so Nemesis's grudge-or-whatever doesn't count, and didn't Harry attack you?"

"Yeah; it was great," Jay answered, breaking into an unabashed smile. "I'm a son of Ares; a fight isn't really a point against them. They didn't really hurt me, or Carlos, or Evie."

"They _robbed_ Carlos."

"Listen, if you guys vote we track them down and fight them, I'll track them down and fight them," Jay said, "but I don't hate them personally. Not for stealing a few backpacks. Before I was claimed, we all thought I was a son of Hermes, I stole so much crap, remember?"

Evie and Carlos nodded. Mal remembered, but refused to acknowledge it. It was true that Jay had been quite a thief, before making it here. He'd _had_ to be. But this was different; this was Uma, with a vendetta, being desperate to make sure they couldn't stop thinking about her even in their new life here. Thinking about the past- their awful, screwed-up past. Uma could have stolen from anyone, but she had come _here_. She had come for them. Mal crossed her arms even more tightly and dryly told them the information she'd been sitting on since last night: 

"They brought a new kid into their pirate crew since you last saw them. And they're going to have two more before the week is out." She looked up to meet the eyes of everyone in the room. "I dreamed it. So this isn't some small problem that's going to just go away, some candle fire that'll burn itself out. Uma never gives up; Harry never forgives or forgets. They will surround us and smother us if we let them."

"Maybe we shouldn't have left them alone," Carlos spoke up. He was staring into the fire, working a small puzzle toy with his hands. "Locking someone away with only bad feelings...it can mess with you. Maybe we shouldn't have left them like that." His Head Counselor sat down beside him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

"We were kids," Mal said, more solemnly, dropping down from the pool table on whose edge she was sitting and walking closer to Carlos. (His human mother had had her bad days, her throw-a-fit-and-lock-him-in-the-closet days, in between short bursts of tearful sanity. If Shrimp Girl's pirate antics were bringing up _those_ sorts of memories in Carlos, then that was just another reason to shut this whole thing down.) "We were just as scared as they were."

"But _we_ got away," Carlos said. "We got into camp. They just want to stay _close_ to camp."

"That's just it, though; they're not in camp," the Head Counselor of Ares Cabin said. "This is a meeting for the camp, not for anyone who might care about our decision. What does it mean for _us_ if they stay?"

"We can't stop them from staying," the Head of Athena Cabin countered. "That's a moot point, now; if we do anything to drive them out again, Poseidon will do something back. The question is, moving forward, what is the nature of our relationship with these 'pirate' kids? Do we assign campers to guard the entire border? Because they don't always attack near the tree, and we can't just let them rob us."

"Guards, then," the Ares kid said. "Watch our perimeter, give them no opportunity to catch someone alone. Once they see they get nothing from us, they leave of their own accord, Poseidon has no reason to curse us." She clapped her hands when she was done, as if to say 'Case closed'.

"Guards," Evie echoed, and nodded slightly, seemingly swayed in favor of these measures. "Then they can stay, but they can't do anything bad."

"She doesn't give up," Mal emphasized. Ironically, she seemed to be the only one _not_ underestimating Uma. "If we let her _gain_ power, she will _use_ it."

"I asked my father if he would forgive their curses," Ben interjected for the first time. He was still sitting on the pool table; Mal had been sitting next to him.

"You what?" Mal boggled. "Ben...you didn't tell me."

"Well, I figured it was between me and dad," he said, calmly but unhappily. "It was only a few days ago, and he didn't answer. Not directly, at least. But then I dreamed of a storm, and I had a feeling he was telling me...that he wasn't going to back down now that the other gods were getting invested. It would make him look weak, and it would hurt his relationships with the gods and goddesses who cursed the pirates in the first place." He raised his head, and even though he was just an ordinary camper in an ordinary camp t-shirt and sneakers, the way he sat in that moment made it seem like he was wearing the world's heaviest crown. "It's rare for the gods to revoke a punishment. He won't do it at just my request, anymore."

"You got all that from a storm?" Jay snarked, impervious to situational gravity.

Mal kept trying to meet Ben's eyes, while Evie kept trying to meet hers.

"Storms can be full of subtext," Chiron said sagely.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The rain started falling before they even made it back to their base.

"Now _everyone's_ happy," Gil said, catching the raindrops in his upturned palms.

Harry had a different take on things: "You couldn't have asked your dad to make it rain _acid_ on them?" he asked Uma, pointing at the trees with his hook as they walked.

"Then it would rain it on us, too," Desiree argued. "Uma did a great job."

"Course Uma did a great job," Harry retorted. "Doesn't mean I don't want to see the bark sizzle off these stupid tree hags."

"Desi, run ahead to make sure our bags are still at base," Uma directed. "If they are, keep them out of the mud 'til we get there."

"On it," Desiree said, and she took off. There was a _smack_ sound, a few seconds later, as she either slipped in the mud or tripped over a tree root, followed by a faint "I'm okay!". Then her footsteps continued to patter away.

"Everything's okay, now, right Uma?" Gil asked, examining their captain's expression. He wasn't great at reading people, but he felt that there should have been a smile on Uma's face right now; they had won, hadn't they? But Uma's face was only calm and still, like she was thinking.

She looked at him and saw his unease. "As okay as it gets," she told him, which wasn't a yes. "I just had a weird dream." She had slipped the piece of coal into her pocket. She felt its weight and shape as she walked. "Point is, they let us in. I'll bet the campers loved that."

"Loved it?" Gil repeated.

"I'm being sarcastic. Really I think they hated it. Have any of you eaten yet today?"

"Me and Desi did," Gil answered. "We finished off the potato soup."

"I was waiting for you," Harry said. In their years of traveling together (back when it was just them), it had been an unspoken rule that neither of them ate until the other was present and awake to eat with them. Ostensibly, it was to make sure that they weren't holding out on each other, but eventually they had figured out that they just genuinely cared about making sure the other wasn't hungrier than they were. Anyway, back in that time, togetherness had been the only semblance of community they'd had, so eating together, sleeping together, fighting together...it was all sacred, in a way.

When they'd picked up Gil, he had learned from Harry's behavior, and it had evolved into something near hive-like: bring food to the queen first. Reinforced by the fact that Uma was the most logical choice to receive Gil's haul; Gil was more of a hunter than a thief, and Uma, unlike Harry, actually knew how to skin and cook a dead rabbit because Ursula had often used animal guts as ingredients in her "potions". Plus, Uma distributed things very fairly.

Desiree had missed out on all of this, and in all the chaos, there hadn't been an opportunity for her to learn it, so while she did know to bring whatever she found or stole to Uma, she ate when she could and thought nothing of it.

"Oh. Sorry," Gil said. "Were we supposed to wait?"

"Well she's the captain isn't she?" Harry pointed out, a _slight_ sternness to his gaze. Apparently, he took his role as first mate seriously. That warmed Uma's heart a little.

"Sorry," Gil said.

Uma hooked her arm through Gil's, then Harry's. "This is no time to be sorry," she said, with a decidedly bright tone. "We actually managed to win this one."

Harry hummed, pleased, and bumped her hip with his own. Uma passed on the hip bump to Gil, who passed it back to her, and she completed it by sending it on to Harry again. There were smiles on all of their faces.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Desiree held the bags up over her head to keep them out of the mud.

She could have hung them on the tree branches, but she didn't trust the trees anymore. Besides the obvious throwing incident, she was certain that some of those tree roots had deliberately jumped up to trip her, on the way up here. She had honestly been surprised to find their bags still here, although they were noticeably lighter than they had been before. Some of the campers had probably taken back their things: the compact was missing, though the comb remained (Harry would be happy about that.); the flute thing was gone, as were the matches (which sucked but didn't really matter yet, in this much rain), but they still had their rope and extra clothes.

She ran through this mental list repeatedly so that she would be able to tell it to Uma, when she and the others caught up. Desiree hadn't been a part of the crew for very long, but somehow she was already constantly looking for ways to earn Uma's approval. Having Uma, who was normally either stoic or filled with righteous fury, smile at her or tell her she'd done well was like being struck by lightning, but in a good way. She liked her place in the crew, being a friend to Gil and bickering with Harry and being led by Uma. It was the sort of thing she had never thought to want, but now, even when she resented the "campers" on the other side of the hill, she didn't really wish to be one of them.

Well, she did. She wanted to eat tons of food and spar with real weapons and sleep in a bed. But whenever she imagined that, now, her mind erased all the other campers and replaced them with Uma and Gil and Harry. After all, who else would she share paradise with?

"Desi?" Uma's voice was nearby, but she wasn't yet in sight.

"I'm here!" Desiree called back. No one had ever called her 'Desi' before joining the crew. Uma had made it her nickname first, and the boys had followed suit. She liked 'Desi'; having an affectionate nickname made her feel taken care of.

Gil came between the trees, into their hiding place, followed closely by Harry and Uma.

"So the bags are still here," Uma observed, taking one from her to lighten Desiree's load. (Harry and Gil did the same. Harry took the bag out of Uma's hands, as well.) "That's good."

"They took the compact, the flute thing, the matches, and I think some of the trail mix. That last one could've just been squirrels, though."

"The matches weren't even theirs," Uma griped. "Guess it's a good thing we didn't keep the drachmas in the bags."

"They didn't take our clothes," Gil noticed.

"Of course not; they're dirty," Uma said, and this seemed to amuse her, in a grim sort of way. Then she added, "We can't stay here; they know where it is, now. We need a new base."

"Aww. But this was such a good base," Gil said.

"It was," Harry agreed, which was a display of positivity that made Desiree suspect that Gil had been the one to originally find this spot. "We'll find another one, mate."

They wandered to scope out the terrain, staying together instead of spreading out because the rain was only picking up and Uma didn't want anyone getting lost in all this downpour and noise. Even still, Desiree kept tripping over the tree roots, and she was convinced that the dryads were actively trying to separate her from her new friends. She grabbed onto the back of Gil's shirt collar; Gil always placed his feet correctly. He was helping Uma balance, too, with a hand at her back and one at her elbow. Harry went at the troublesome roots and slippery mud like they were an obstacle course set up just for him, hopping and stumbling with what was approaching a certain showmanship. (Uma had to smile, watching the theatrics.)

"When you fall on your face and get covered in mud, I'll laugh at you," Desiree said.

"That any way to talk to yer captain's first mate?" Harry said.

After about an hour of miserable rain walking, Gil spotted a place for them, and Uma dried the ground with a wave of her hand (and became dizzy right after, but did not pass out), and they all settled down for lunch.

"I'm starved," Uma sighed while Harry opened a can.

"So am I," Harry agreed, then added, "because _I_ didn't eat before you." He pointedly handed Uma the opened can.

Desiree's stomach did a weird clutch thing. "Was I not supposed to do that?"

Uma didn't answer; her mouth was full.

Harry bumped Uma's arm lightly with his own. "Some people don't know how to treat a captain." He winked, then took the can gratefully as she, rolling her eyes, passed it to him.

"Hey, that's not fair," Gil interjected on the topic of Harry's comment. "No one said it was, like, a _rule_. I'm bad at guessing that sort of thing."

Harry passed him the can once he had taken his mouthful, around which he said, "Just do whatever I'm doing, then, Gilly."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Uma said, poking Harry in the stomach. "And _don't_ do whatever Harry's doing," she added to Gil, whose cheeks were full as he handed the can on to Desiree, who handed it to Uma without taking anything. Uma's eyes narrowed at her, and Desiree shrank a little. "You're not eating now?"

"I'm fine," Desiree answered, determined to right her earlier wrong.

"Harry's just being Harry," Uma told her. "Don't starve yourself over it." (Missing a single meal was _not_ the same thing as starving, which Uma, of all people, well knew, but missing a meal deliberately was certainly negligence, in her eyes.)

Desiree fidgeted with her fingers uncomfortably. "I ate when you didn't," she said quietly. "Now you can eat while I don't. I'm just making it even."

Uma handed her the can, almost aggressively. "Eat something. Captain's orders. You need your strength; no punishing yourself on my watch."

Desiree complied, scooping out a conservative amount of food for herself and briefly glancing at Harry as if expecting him to have something to say about it. For his part, Harry was slightly torn, as the idea of making things even appealed to him at his very core, but the words "Captain's orders" had to mean something, period, so his expression was blank rather than disapproving.

As she handed the can back to Uma, sans her tiny withdrawal, Desiree met her eyes and found them studying her. She instantly worried, over what Uma was looking for and over whether she found it in her. No one had ever thought much of Desiree, not in her entire life. People's eyes had always just danced right over her, whether she was hiding from someone she'd robbed of their wallet or standing directly in front of her mother, waving her arms in the hopes of being singularly acknowledged in the midst of all her half-siblings crying for the same. Attention had always been in tragically short supply, and having Uma's eyes this focused on her, not even for the first time, made it hard for her to breathe. 

In a second, the same second that their hands touched as Uma took the can, the captain's reflective look changed to a light smile. "Can't have you climbing trees on half-power, can we, Desi?" She rapped the back of her wrist against Desiree's shoulder casually, and she could breathe again.

"We just won't eat before her anymore," Gil said sagely, and Desiree managed to smile.

She felt dazed and somewhat emotionally raw.

The feeling died down as they finished up the meal, as Uma threw the emptied can over her shoulder and muttered, "Take that, trees," when it hit something, and Harry said, "You know what my dad used to say about empty cans: 'Stop ducking'.", and they sat up awhile, talking about future plans a little bit but mostly just taking the opportunity to relax.

Later that night, to the white noise of a storming sky, Desiree fell asleep among her crew mates (closer to each other than they were to her, but she didn't mind) with Uma watching over them. As she drifted off, curled up in a ball to minimize contact with the rain (The tree-cover was not flawless.), she pretended she was an egg in a tiny nest.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Uma didn't wake anyone else to switch out guard duty. With the rain against her flesh, she felt exceptionally alive.

The day's downpour had healed the burn on her hand, but still she felt like the skin where it _had_ been was different somehow. She took out the coal from her pocket, and turned it over. By all appearances, it was just regular coal, but it had been given to her for a reason. While part of her was tempted to just chuck it into the woods as a rejection of whatever game the immortals were playing, she resisted the urge. This was something altogether more cryptic than Ares's brash visit; some long-game thing that she couldn't yet understand.

She wondered if her dream entity was waiting for her to fall asleep. She imagined an impatient little thing irately pacing around inside her head, and it was funny up until she ran upon the implication that the voice was actually _in_ her mind, interacting with her thoughts, rather than some external force merely speaking to her, and she panicked for a few seconds before sternly reminding herself, _Cool it! I don't_ know _where it comes from!_ , which wasn't a _great_ comfort, but it was the truth.

When the sun started to rise, Uma pocketed the coal again, and she started uncanning a breakfast for her crew. This was their next-to-last can; they would have to do something about that soon. It was always awful when they ran out of cans.

Gil was just beginning to wake up ( _He probably smells food,_ Uma guessed with a smirk.) when an unpleasant metallic tearing noise sounded startlingly close by.

Instantly on alert, Uma pointed a finger in the direction of the sound and then made a series of gestures that Gil knew to mean 'Go check it out; I'll wake the others'.

With a level of stealth that only he could manage, Gil prowled silently in the direction of the interloper, one hand on his knife. He was surprised, when he cleared the obscuring tree, to find what appeared to be a goat from the waist down but a man from the waist up, chewing on the empty can from last night's dinner. The half-goat man froze when he spotted Gil with the knife, and he cautiously dropped the can (now unrecognizably damaged) and raised his hands over his head.

"Don't hurt me! I'm not a fighter," he babbled out desperately, as Uma and Harry arrived behind Gil. "I'm not here for you. I don't even care about pirates. I m-mean, uh-"

"You're a satyr," Uma interrupted. "You work for the camp?"

"I mean, I don't, uh, don't necessarily work _for_ the camp," the satyr said nervously. "I tend to the dryads."

"That's not helping your case, mate," Harry said, and Gil was interested to note the difference in tone with which Harry called the satyr "mate" in comparison to how Harry called _him_ "mate". There was a lilting sort of sarcastic regret to the way Harry was speaking right now, not a smidge of actual care. "We're not exactly friendly with the tree hags, either."

"Listen," the satyr tried again, and Gil looked over at Uma and saw that she was almost definitely about to tell the satyr to just _go_ , but already the thing was babbling again: "I have to care for nature. It's my calling from Pan." (The satyr was so busy explaining, he missed the way Harry's head tilted threateningly at that name.) "Of course Pan doesn't, uh, isn't around anymore, but it still falls to the satyrs of the world to-"

"Hold up," Uma said, raising a hand for silence. (Since the hand that she raised was also holding a knife, the satyr shut up immediately.) "What do you mean Pan isn't around anymore?"

The satyr dipped his head as if in mourning. "He faded."

"Faded?" Harry repeated roughly. "What does that mean?"

"It means he doesn't exist anymore," the satyr said. "Not in this world or the Underworld or Tartarus...He's nowhere."

Harry took a half-step back, then exhaled like a load had been lifted. Indeed, his grudge for the one who had cursed him, the feeling of dissatisfaction that had been planted in him way back when he was too young to read, was being pulled away like a splinter under the skin: leaving a slight soreness, but better for its absence. He was not suddenly unburdened, but the relief was something to bask in.

Uma's hand was still raised, and her mind was racing too much for her to think to put it down. "Do you mean to tell me that gods can die?"

The satyr looked afraid to answer.

"What happened to make Pan fade?" Uma asked, an unbelievable brightness in her eyes that made Harry's heartbeat pick up with excitement.

Apparently sensing bad intentions, the satyr turned to flee.

"Desi!" Uma called out, and Desiree dropped from a tree and landed on the satyr's back, pinning him to the ground.

Harry hooted gleefully and ran to stand over the creature.

Gil waited for Uma's word. She inclined her head to him and calmly said, "Go get the rope; we've got a prisoner." Then, as if she couldn't help herself, she broke into a grin of such giddiness that Gil momentarily had trouble turning away.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

After a few minutes of vacantly staring as two of the younger children of Hecate levitated each other's silverware, Mal finally left the breakfast table. She hadn't eaten much; after making her usual offering to Hecate, she had picked at what was left on the plate and then become lost in thought.

The sky was still overcast from last night's storm, and it was raining off and on. Ben had disappeared into the Zeus Cabin, where, as a more-or-less only child, he would not be bothered. Carlos was likely still studying in the Athena Cabin with his headphones on. Jay was easy enough to find, sparring with his sister-on-the-godly-side, Lonnie. Rain or shine, they were warriors.

Evie...

Well, Mal had spoken to Evie at dinner the previous night.

"Oh, spaghetti," she had observed as she paused by the Aphrodite table, where her best friend was primly arranging her forks and napkins like she was in a fancy restaurant rather than the same general area where a daughter of Hermes was actively lobbing mashed potatoes at the Hephaestus table to get somebody's attention. "That's funny; from that Counselors Meeting today, I could have sworn you preferred _shrimp."_

Evie had sent her an unamused look. "Don't be petty," she'd said calmly. "I said what I believed; if Uma is starving-"

"-then she can do what we all did when we were starving: Steal from _someone else,"_ Mal had interrupted.

Evie had frowned slightly, then sighed and shrugged. "I don't know what she's doing here."

"I do! She's here about _us._ She's mad at us, mad we got in and she didn't."

"I know. I could tell."

"Then why would you want them to stay? Five minutes with them, and Carlos is...feeling like he used to feel before. I didn't even see her, and I'm getting nightmares again. Uma is _bad_ for us. She's a...bad _omen."_

A deceptively dainty-seeming hand twirling noodles around the teeth of her fork had been Evie's only response for a few seconds. "They're sending out guards," she had finally stated. "They can't do anything with the guards watching."

That was where the conversation had ended.

Mal regretted this, now. It sucked to be like this with Evie; they were never icy with each other.

She paused a moment, watching Lonnie and Jay whirl around each other in the rain, swords clanging and long hair flying out of ponytails. Lonnie made a slash in the armpit of Jay's camp t-shirt and laughed at him loudly.

She would have to see Evie. She couldn't stay this way.

The rain started to fall more heavily, and Mal dodged other campers who were shrieking and running into the nearest thing with a roof. She started at the Aphrodite Cabin, but all she found were a few tweens teaching each other to contour (and reducing to fits of giggles when they failed miserably). Next she checked the stables; Evie loved the pegasi. No luck there, either. She wasn't on the porch of the Good House, nor the strawberry fields.

It was concern for Carlos rather than expectation that Evie would be there that led Mal to visit Athena's cabin once more, but sure enough, Evie was there, sitting at Carlos's desk beside him. He was still reading with his headphones on, although now he was doing it one-handed and Evie was filing his nails.

"Got room for a mighty sorceress?" Mal called to them (ignoring the annoyed shushes of the few other Athena kids also studying here).

"I'll let you know when I see one," Evie replied with a teasing smile. She pointed behind herself, at Carlos's bed (close to the desk, the little nerd). "Sit. When I'm done with Carlos's nails, I'll do something about that hair."

Mal placed a hand on her own head, from where her purple her purple tresses dangled, unbrushed, and relented without argument.

"Carlos is partnering with the Hephaestus Cabin to make a better chariot," Evie said.

"Does it have seat belts?" Mal joked, directing her remark at Carlos specifically this time.

It took a second, but finally Carlos spoke up, albeit in a flat tone: "Yeah, it does." (Mal laughed. It had been their joke for a while that Carlos hated how unsafe the chariots were, whereas Mal and Jay perceived their unsafeness to be part of the fun.) After another second, he added on: "At least, there's a harness to secure you to the chariot; not a 'seat belt', per se, because there still aren't really any seats."

"Are there cupholders?" Mal asked coyly.

 _This_ finally earned her Carlos's full gaze; he looked at her like she was insane. "Why on earth would there be cupholders on a _chariot?"_ he asked.

"In case you get thirsty," Mal and Evie said at the same time, and it wasn't even really a joke, but they both still ended up laughing. Carlos eventually had to laugh at _their_ laughter, and he returned to reading with a slightly lightened feeling.

They were all silent for the few minutes that followed. The sounds of rain and pages turning nearly made Mal fall asleep, especially since she hadn't rested well the previous night.

Evie finished up with Carlos's fingernails and then instantly had a hairbrush in hand, seemingly out of nowhere, to sort Mal out.

"So much rain," she commented, lifting and setting down soaking wet locks at random.

For a little while, Mal just enjoyed the feeling of being tended to by Evie the expert, but soon she had to get it off her chest:

"I had another nightmare where Uma breaks the barrier and storms the camp," Mal said quietly, glancing at Carlos to be sure that the mention of Uma wouldn't upset him. (Fortunately, it appeared that he couldn't hear her.)

Evie sighed, her fingers fluidly separating Mal's hair into sections. "You know that prophecies are Apollo's area, not Hecate's."

"Oh, sorry; maybe we should bring Chad Charming in here instead? Evie, _you_ know that this doesn't mean nothing."

"The counselors already decided our course of action, Mal. What exactly do you want to do?"

This question gave Mal pause. In the back of her mind, she knew what she wanted, but it took a second to bring those thoughts to the forefront; she hadn't really thought she would get this far with Evie so soon. "Well," she said, and sat up straighter to bring some authority into her words, "if Shrimpy gets to operate outside the rules, so do we."

"What does that mean?" Carlos asked, swiveling in his chair to face them, and Mal was calmed to note that he didn't seem to yet be in opposition to her plan; he was hearing her out.

As thunder rumbled outside, and as Evie silently worked through the tangles in her hair, Mal laid out her plan.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

"I don't know what you're upset about," Uma said to the satyr. "We let you finish eating the can. I think we've been fair. Don't you think we've been fair?"

"I think you've been _more_ than fair, captain," Harry gushed. He hadn't stopped smiling since the news about Pan, and this new degree of gleeful liberation in him was enough to keep Uma smiling, as well.

The satyr, bound hopelessly with rope, had gone from terrified to terrifically annoyed in the course of the past hour. He jerked his head to the side angrily as Desiree poked his cheek with a stick. "Why can't you guys just leave things alone?" he demanded.

"Leaving things alone is for immortals," Uma said. "...who apparently aren't so immortal," she added slyly.

"Do you see this storm?" the satyr said. "That's not just rain for the dryads; already, you've upset the balance on Olympus. What do you hope to accomplish, provoking these forces?"

"I'm not really the one who has to answer questions here," Uma said breezily.

"You'll have to answer to _someone,"_ the satyr said.

"You talk pretty bold, for a creature whose patron god disappeared," Harry cackled.

"I'm still in the service of Dionysus," the satyr said. "He'll retaliate for this. Mr. D is close friends with Nemesis; they often ally to inflict madness as a punishment for slights."

Harry winced, but didn't stop smiling; if anything, he smiled _harder_ , more fiercely. "What? You feel slighted?" he said, in a mock-pitying tone.

"As soon as you tell us how and why gods fade, you get to leave," Uma said.

Desiree poked him with the stick again.

"Will you tell her to stop that?" the satyr bleated irately.

"You're lucky it's a stick, mate," Harry said, winking at Desiree, who grinned.

"I don't _know_ how or why they fade," the satyr insisted. "They just _do."_

"Really. And Pan didn't say anything about it before he vanished?" Uma said, and she started cleaning her nails with the tip of her knife.

"He...no. No, he didn't."

"He's lying!" Desiree accused, pointing with her stick.

"Uh-huh," Uma agreed. "He must think we're stupid. Someone had to have been with Pan when he faded. Otherwise, you wouldn't know he was gone; you'd just assume he was laying low. And if someone was with him, they probably know _something_ about why it happened."

"Then ask _them,"_ the satyr said, with a look in his eyes like he'd like to see them _try_ taking on whoever had heard Pan's last words.

"No thanks; we're asking you. And you're gonna stay here until you tell us what you know."

"I'm not telling you anything."

"Fine." Uma stood. "Desi, you're on satyr watch; make sure he doesn't somehow get out of those ropes. Harry and I are gonna see if we can do some light pirating. If Gil comes back with meat, tell him to skin and gut it himself; we won't be long."

Harry waved goodbye to the satyr with his hook before following Uma away.

The satyr glowered at Desiree's stick as if just waiting for her to poke him with it again. As a joke, she twitched the hand holding the stick, and the satyr flinched, and Desiree laughed.

"Got a name?" she asked.

"I'm not telling you pirates my name," the satyr scoffed.

"You'll tell us everything, eventually." In this, she felt confident. "No one's good at keeping secrets with their feet to the fire. Or..." (She nudged the satyr's feet with her stick.) "...with their weird goat paws to the fire."

"They're _hooves,"_ the satyr said, sounding offended more than anything.

Desiree waved a dismissive hand. "Whatever they're called."

"Come on, everyone knows what hooves are; horses have them!"

"I don't like horses."

Meanwhile, Harry and Uma hiked toward the pine tree.

Uma watched Harry as they went. He was eyeing his ever-sharpened hook with a resting smile and humming to himself so quietly she could barely hear it over the rain.

"Still happy about Pan?" she guessed.

His resting smile turned into an outright grin. "Old pillock had it coming and actually got it."

"Maybe that means your curse wore off," Uma said casually.

Harry looked at her, then, his smile gone, and Uma lamented the dampened mood while still continuing:

"You should check to see if the border still keeps you back."

"Aye," Harry agreed, sounding defensive. "And what if it doesn't? I go down, have a bit o' vengeance, come back up, right?"

Uma kept looking at him.

"Yer not telling me to stay down in that fart-jar camp," Harry said defiantly, and he stopped walking.

"Why don't you want to?" Uma asked, also stopping. "You really like sleeping in the mud and eating from cans all the time? You'd rather steal other people's crap _forever_ than have some crap of your own? You saw how healthy the others got: Carlos actually has some meat on him; Jay has _muscles;_ Evie..." (She almost faltered, there, feeling slightly embarrassed and self-conscious.) "...grew...also. More than I did. You could've _won_ that fight with Jay if you had decent meals and decent sleep."

"And what about you? What would you be doing?"

"My best."

"You expect me to sleep on heckin' _cushions_ , alone, while you're out here?" Harry shook his head in scorn.

"I expect you to give yourself the best you can get," she insisted. "You can help us from the inside as much as you can, but you _have_ to help yourself. Getting as strong as we can make ourselves, that's how we _win_ , Hook. We don't win by surrendering opportunities."

"Well, I can't get in anyway," Harry said, almost smugly. "I tried to spit down the hill the other day, and I couldn't. So it looks like I'm sleeping in mud for the time being."

Uma pursed her lips. He hadn't actually done anything wrong, but she hated the _thought_ of him staying out here when he didn't have to. "Well, fine. Guess you are." She shoved at his shoulder and kept walking.

"You're really mad?"

"A little."

"What for?"

"Because you wouldn't have gone."

Harry sighed heavily but kept close. Uma had always been the one telling him when he deserved better: better than what his father did to hurt him, better than what the gods did to hurt them, better than _this_. When they were both tiny and she had seethed over his bruised face, declaring that they should run away together, he had been as ready to agree as if the idea had been his own. (And maybe, somewhere in his mind, it had been.) But that was just it; they always, always ran away _together_. Always. He didn't _know_ how to feel okay in a place where she wasn't, and he didn't want to.

They continued walking in a grouchy silence.

Harry was frustrated, a bit with Uma but mostly with life in general for sucking so badly that Uma would probably never be completely satisfied. But his frustration with Uma was the one that was addressable, so he indulged it, immaturely, by loudly making throat-clearing noises that he knew annoyed her. Uma sent him a dirty look but otherwise didn't react.

He quieted down when they started to get close to the pine tree. There were two boys already there, seemingly two or three years older than they were. One was lanky, with corn rows and thoroughly decimated tennis shoes. The other was shorter, stockier, with a red bandana secured around a head-full of braids and no shoes on his feet.

At first, Harry thought the boys were sparring, because they had their swords out and appeared to be readying to strike out with them.

"Ready?" the lanky one said.

The stocky one nodded.

"One...two...THREE."

Both of them drove their swords into the air opposite the pine tree. The swords stabbed through the air unopposed, but neither boy's hands could follow; the force of their stabs drove the swords out of their grip as the barrier held them back. Their hands slipped from the hilts of their weapons, and the swords slid a little ways down the hill.

The stocky one tried to reach for his lost weapon, as if forgetting that it was now divided from him by the very barrier they'd been trying to attack. The lanky one slammed the side of fist into the invisible wall, clearly not in the hope of breaking it, but just in rage.

Uma's eyes went from the boys to the out-of-reach swords and back again. "Were those your only weapons?" she called out, alerting both to her presence at once.

The boys startled, then assumed defensive positions.

"Come any closer, you'll find out," the lanky one said aggressively, and something about him, even though he was unarmed, gave Harry the vaguest echo of the terror he'd felt when he was a child being frightened by Furies. A small, wild part of him suddenly wanted to either hide behind Uma or hide her behind him.

Uma tilted her head, impervious. "You're both cursed."

"So what if we are?" the lanky one said.

"So, you tried to un-curse yourselves using _swords?"_ Uma mocked lightly.

"Beat it."

Uma advanced, and Harry did as well, holding his hook at the ready and making sure the boys saw it.

"This is _our_ hill," Uma said simply. "If you can't get into La La Land, you're in our territory."

"Says who?" the stocky one asked, but without as much defiance as the lanky one.

"Says her, y'bampot," Harry said, holding his hook higher. He hoped that the strangers would leave, if only because the expression that Uma was wearing looked familiar, from the day they brought in Desiree, and Harry was only _just_ getting used to the newest addition.

"Then again, we'd love to watch, if you guys are gonna punch the barrier until it disappears." Uma was not letting up on the mockery, and Harry broke into a grin even while he was staring the boys down.

"You rugrats get lost; I'm not telling you again," the lanky one warned, the feeling of dread he seemed to induce intensifying in Harry's chest so that he was forced to glance uncertainly at his captain.

Uma was readying a retort when suddenly the stocky boy swayed and fell to the ground, not unconscious but clearly faint, and her laughing expression turned to pure alertness. "Is he okay?"

The lanky boy looked as surprised as they were. "Zo?" he said to his companion.

"'S just my head," the boy called 'Zo' slurred. "Guess I hit it harder than we thought. I'll be fine."

"He needs ambrosia," Uma assessed. "You boys got any?"

The lanky boy glared at her for a second before his demeanor slackened and he admitted, "No. My mom gave us some before we came here, but we finished it off yesterday. We thought we wouldn't need it; we thought we'd get in. Then Gonzo banged his head on this...barrier."

"'M fine, Jonas," Gonzo said unconvincingly.

"We knew we were cursed," the lanky boy, apparently named Jonas, murmured, probably to himself at this point. "We knew that, but my mom said we'd find a home here, and she's never been wrong..." He was interrupted by a new voice:

"Hey! What's going on here?"

All four of them- well, the three of them who weren't likely concussed -turned in startlement to face the newcomers: approaching from within the camp, five heroes dressed in light armor over their bright camp t-shirts. One of them was familiar.

"Jay," Harry growled, not in the mood for coyness this time, but Uma put placed a hand on him to keep him from starting anything.

"We're allowed to be here," she said straightforwardly. "The gods have spoken."

"First of all, the gods are _clearly_ not done speaking," one of the campers (a perky, muscular girl standing close to Jay; Harry recognized her as one of the few campers who seemed to travel to and from camp rather regularly; they had seen her pass many times, but on Uma's orders they hadn't tried to rob her) said, pointing at the ominous sky. "Second of all, what happened to that guy?"

"His head hit the barrier," Uma said.

"More cursed-borns," Jay surmised. "So, you're out here recruiting?"

"Recruiting?" Jonas echoed.

Uma artfully and unabashedly evaded the question. "You heroes are _that_ scared of us that we can't even talk to other cursed-borns without you worrying about more pirates?"

"Pirates?" Jonas repeated.

"Pirates?" Gonzo said also, in a tone as if he was confirming that he hadn't hallucinated the word.

"Mal said you already added one new kid to your crew," Jay said.

"And where'd the traitor-witch pull that out of?" Harry demanded.

"Her crystal ball must be as cracked as she is," Uma said. "What are you all dressed like doomed gladiators for?"

"We're guarding the border," one hero said. "To make sure our campers aren't being robbed."

"Where's the other one?" Jay asked suspiciously. "Your blond friend. Where is he?"

Uma didn't answer. Harry expected the news that the barrier was going to be manned, now, to make her angry, but instead she just seemed to be...processing. Like the heroes had moved a chess piece and now it was her turn. Harry watched her attentively.

Finally, Uma dug in her pocket, pulled out a square of ambrosia, and dropped it casually onto Gonzo's chest. "Let's roll, Harry," she said. "Obviously we're not getting anything by this tree."

To Harry's relief, when they started to walk away, she didn't afford Jonas or Gonzo so much as another glance. 

She did, however, pause mid-step as if she'd just remembered something, turn to the guards, and say, "Oh! And you heroes should stay out of the lake. That's ours."

"You can't even get _in_ to the lake on our side," one of them scoffed.

Uma smiled sweetly (which motivated Harry to glare at the camper all the harder). "No," she agreed, "but I'm still the daughter of Poseidon," (Jonas looked flabbergasted by this news.) "and the people who make themselves my enemies don't get to enjoy my father's domain." Then she made the same gesture she had made when cursing the trees, and Harry wondered if it was actually magical or if she had just decided to make it her trademark. "Bye."

This time, they _actually_ walked away, Uma with her back as straight as a queen's.

"So that was a bust," Harry said.

"We can just pirate farther from the barrier," Uma answered. "They can't guard the whole hill, and it sounds like they gave up trying to keep us off it."

"So it's back to Desi and Furry Legs."

"Looks like it." A concise answer.

"You still mad?"

"No. Well, maybe." She was silent, for a few seconds, to think about it. Her head tilted back just slightly to receive the coming rain, as if it would wash her mind clean of all confusion. "I think I'm...mad that you _can't_ have better, not that you wouldn't if you could." She shook her head. "It's not fair. Not with Mal being such a poser and... Actually...wait, yeah, I _am_ a little mad that you wouldn't have better if you could." She jabbed his side playfully, then, he cackled, running a hand through his hair, and everything was fine.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Seemingly as proof that Uma was making things worse just by being close by, the Counselors had to meet _again_ , for the second time in a single week.

"The naiads haven't been seen on the lake's surface all day," Chiron said.

"And you think it's related to Uma?" Evie guessed, since Jay and Carlos had again been invited to the meeting.

"Yesterday's barrier guards said that she warned us to stay out of the lake," Chiron said.

"Threatened, actually, and it was around the same time the naiads ditched us," Jay confirmed. "Shrimpy's really pulling some strings."

(Mal smiled. At least _one_ of her friends still used the nickname they'd given Uma when they were kids. She remembered Uma had _hated_ it, too. In hindsight, Mal guessed Uma was thin-skinned about her parents, and especially about people not taking her "daughter of Poseidon" thing seriously. She almost empathized, but that wouldn't be productive right now.)

"We don't really... _need_ the naiads, though, do we?" Evie said, looking to all of them for input. "I mean, they're just friendly visitors. It's not that bad..."

"But it means that Uma's suggestion that we stay out of the lake might actually carry weight," the Head Counselor of the Athena cabin said. "And the naiads are declaring their side."

Mal's slight smile vanished when she realized the implications. "So we can't trust the naiads anymore."

The rest of the meeting went by pretty quickly, with little actually said or agreed upon. Mal only stayed because Ben had finally left his cabin to attend this meeting. He looked tired and upset.

"It's just that none of this seems right," he said to her quietly once the meeting was over. "I don't know how to fix it, but I know this isn't right."

"You don't have to fix everything," Mal told him, just as quietly.

"Then who does?"

Their conversation wasn't long; soon he was sulking back up to the Zeus cabin and Mal was putting her plan into action: following the lake past the trees and up into the hillside. She didn't touch the water; she just kept near the lake.

Unlike the other heroes, she could feel it when she walked through the barrier; felt it like when you walk into a grocery store that has an air vent over the entry door. A gentle brushing of the air, but nothing that wouldn't yield to her. (She would never tell anyone this, not even Evie, but she liked to pretend that the brief sensation of passing through the barrier was the equivalent of a hug from Hecate. Her mother. It was dumb, but...it was nice.)

She chose a spot by the lake and waited there, led by intuition alone.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

They fed their last food can, now empty, to the goat man.

"Don't call me that," the satyr grumbled.

"Well, you wouldn't tell us your name," Gil pointed out fairly.

The satyr chewed the can awhile before grudgingly saying, "It's Doug. My name. It's Doug."

"Okay, Doug." Gil made to shake his hand before remembering that the satyr was tied up. Desi laughed.

"The sky is clearing," Harry noted, in a dreamy tone because Uma was combing his hair and he always melted when she combed his hair.

"It's a lake day, I think," Uma agreed.

"Are we gonna take Doug with us?" Desiree asked eagerly. She had developed a fondness for their prisoner, probably because he was someone lower-ranking in the crew than she was and she could annoy him without consequences.

"Sure," Uma said, and Doug muttered something about how he wasn't their pet while Desi fed him the rest of the can. "Ask him if he can braid," she added sardonically.

Her hair was loose; she had undone it last night, with help from the boys.

"I think only Gil and I should be entrusted with your hair, captain," Harry argued, noticeably leaving out Desiree even though his _main_ point was about Doug, and Uma hummed her assent; some things weren't for everyone. She cared about Desi, and she would fight for Desi, but it was _different_ than it was with Gil and Harry, and she had boundaries.

"Gil next," Uma said, and Harry sighed tragically but moved out of the way so Gil could have his hair combed. "Dude, how did you get this much mud in your hair? You never trip."

Gil laughed as the tiny clumps of mud rained down on his shoulders with every stroke of the comb. "I was chasing down a squirrel."

"Same squirrel we ate for dinner?"

"Yep."

Uma patted his head approvingly.

She had only taken one guard shift, last night, so she had actually slept some. There had been no dreams, though. No nighttime visits to Olympus or Camp Half-Blood, no mysterious voice. It was almost disappointing. But she couldn't help but to think that this was somehow related to the piece of coal that she still had in her pocket. Maybe she had to do something with it before she got another dream, maybe the dreams had been a means to an end to get her the coal, but she doubted that either of those were true; the mysterious voice had not seemed related to the fire on Olympus. Not positively, at least. And if they had been trying to get her the coal, then the first dream made no sense. So, Uma's next assumptions were that either last night was a fluke and the coal had nothing to do with the dreams, or the coal was a repellent for the dreams sent by some third party.

Uma returned to the present when the comb encountered a section of Gil's hair that was particularly thick with mud. She said a curse word in mild surprise. "The comb's stuck."

Gil's hand went up to his head. "Forever?" he asked.

"Nah; we'll wash it out at the lake."

She left the comb in his hair. Gil pulled at it a little, then marveled, "It really is in there."

"Hang on, mate. Let me try." Harry went and crouched down in front of Gil, and he commenced tugging the comb in different directions.

As she loaded up one of their bags, Uma caught sight of Gil's blushing face, and it made her smile to herself, but she wasn't sure why.

At any rate, the comb didn't budge, and soon they were commuting toward the lake, Doug still bound in ropes so that his paces were tiny and his progress was slow.

"You sure it'll wash out?" Gil asked, still trying to wiggle the comb free.

"Sure it will," Harry said. "All the things Uma's had stuck in her hair, you'll be fine."

"Uma?" Desiree asked, tapping her captain's arm with the hand that wasn't holding on to one of Doug's ropes.

"Yeah?" Uma replied, while pulling her arm away. She was not casual about physical contact like that; when she was touching someone, or when they were touching her, there had to be a reason.

"Can you braid my hair, too? Can you do it like yours?"

Uma reached up to touch her own hair, unwoven and thick, and considered the question. Desiree's hair was of a different texture entirely. "I don't know," she answered honestly. "I can try."

Desiree smiled at the idea, and Uma wondered if this was what it was like to be idolized. It was a weird feeling, but not one that she ended up having much time to think on.

They arrived at the lake, and Uma was appalled by what she saw:

Dressed in the detested orange t-shirt, with her purple hair styled in an artful ponytail and her pale but heart-shaped face in a smirk, was Uma's single least favorite person in a world where people like James Hook existed.

"Afternoon, Shrimpy," Mal said, and Uma's fists balled of their own accord.

"Shrimpy?" Gil said, in a tone as if the name amused him. Hearing Gil say it was like scraping a metal fork against a metal pan.

"Don't repeat that," Harry said firmly, and his hook was out suddenly. "It's the witch."

"Mal," Uma greeted coldly. "Nice of you to take time out of your arts and crafts and pony rides."

"Did you kidnap a satyr?" Mal asked, noticing Doug, and her expression might have been impressed.

 _"Borrowed_ a satyr," Uma said lightly. "He's had a great time; all the cans he can eat."

"I have had _two_ cans," Doug muttered.

"You've made some 'friends' since I last saw you," Mal noted. "Evie said _that_ one's name is 'Gil'..."

"Evie should keep her mouth shut," Harry growled.

"...but that other one's new," Mal went on. "Who's she?"

"None of your business, Jelly-Hair," Desiree shot back, and Uma was pleasantly surprised to see that Desi could appear hard as nails, when she wanted to. She jabbed her stick out in Mal's direction. "Stop talking to my captain like that; she's better than you!"

Mal made a mock-inspired face. Uma rolled her eyes and said:

"I thought I told you _campers_ to stay away from our lake."

"You said to stay _out of_ the lake, according to Jay," Mal said, so smugly. "And I am. And so are you." She didn't seem to notice how the water behind her stirred with Uma's fury.

Uma took steps closer to Mal but found her way barred by an invisible wall like the one that kept her out of camp. "What is this?"

"Magic," Mal said simply. "If we can't have the lake, neither can you."

"That's not how it works."

"It is now." Mal tilted her head to the side with an innocent look.

Uma could have said a lot of things then, but what came out was an inventive and very profane amalgamation of words. So, it seemed Mal was taking after her mom, using barriers to punish what she didn't like. Fine. But the witch had made a mistake in assuming that she could stand at the gateway to Poseidon's domain in Uma's presence. She had forgotten that she was not the only one whose powers had strengthened.

In that moment, Uma became acutely aware of the lake. Intricately aware of it, so much so that she could have sworn that she wasn't made of meat and skin, but rather of water and life; she could feel the ripples in her surface, the creatures swimming through her, and depth, so much depth that _anyone_ could have gotten lost.

There were two Umas: the Uma who was Uma, and the Uma who was the lake. And she wasn't sure which was which right now, but she knew that one Uma was calling to the other, and the other came. She came together. She was complete.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

When she came back to her senses, it was because she was wreathed in brilliant light.

She was underwater. Underwater and...and on fire! She could see the flames on her skin and clothes, unimpeded by the submergence; she could feel them, hot and out of place. It wasn't pain, just intensity. She wasn't the lake anymore, wasn't a force of nature; she was herself. A human born of Poseidon and a cursed sorceress. Full of anger and pain and love and confusion. Strong and weak, small and immense. A gun firing at random pressures. Uma.

The fire was bright, but she couldn't see much of her murky surroundings. She could feel dirt passing under her feet, and somehow she knew that it was because the lake was receding. She had caused it to overflow and consume her, to approach her the way she couldn't approach it, and now it was returning to place...and she with it.

Where were the others?

She was being pulled deeper. She tried to swim to the surface, but the current was stronger than she was. Much stronger, because she wasn't a part of it anymore. She was just a girl fighting the world, just herself.

Uma underwater and burning.

Burning with a fire that didn't consume...Oh.

She reached for the coal in her pocket. Yes, this was the source of the fire. She pulled it out, and as soon as her skin made contact, visions passed before her eyes of Harry and Gil, of the best moments from her earliest years, her mother humming, running the streets with Harry, laughter, saving Gil, all so powerfully remembered that she felt tears in her eyes.

Then she rose from the lake on the back of a silver hippocampus.

The others, all of them, were standing out in the dirt, dripping wet and gaping at her, with fish flapping around breathlessly at their feet.

Doug was on his stomach, coughing up water. Desi was not far from him, seated on her rump as if she'd fallen. Harry and Gil were clutched onto each other, panting. The comb was washed out of Gil's hair and, in fact, seemed to be lost entirely.

And Mal.

Mal was stunned. _Well, surprise, princess._

She had managed to stay on her feet, but she was shaking from the cold, and she hadn't even gained back the presence of mind to glare at Uma; she only gaped. Internally, she ran through the events of the past minutes, finding it difficult to completely understand. The barrier she had made was gone, probably because the lake had distracted her. Either Uma had a closer relationship with her father than anyone had anticipated, or she was _very_ powerful. One thing was for certain: Mal had underestimated her opponent, and she needed to go regroup with her friends before taking a risk like this again.

Uma ran her hand over the head of the creature underneath her. It was a full-grown hippocampus, alright, but she thought she might recognize it. "Luna?"

The creature made a pleased noise, then deposited Uma on dry (well, very very wet) land.

Mal's eyes turned bright green, and she snapped her fingers and vanished from sight without another word.

"Figures," Uma said breathlessly. No, the witch wouldn't stay for a fight when she didn't know her enemy's strength. She was a jerk, but she wasn't an idiot. "Oh, Styx..." Uma stumbled, hand to her head.

Her crew was staring at her in awe, which was great and everything, but she was just as confused as they were. She wanted to say that she had just proven her power, but she felt so incredibly weak. She hadn't been in control, just then; she had been utterly subject to the whims of the lake and of her own emotions. She needed to get a handle on this madness; she had almost been pulled in. Her "power" had overtaken her.

"So you really are the daughter of Poseidon," a voice said, and Jonas emerged from the trees with Gonzo, as matter-of-factly as if he had been a part of this the whole time.

Uma nodded reflexively and, as an afterthought, put the piece of coal, now extinguished, back in her pocket. "Harry?" she managed to squeak out, and then she lost consciousness.

One day, she was going to stop doing that.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Gil cooked up the lake fish for all of them: Harry, Desi, Doug, Jonas, Gonzo, and Uma (when she woke up). It was weird, having enough food for this many people. It was like being in his dad's house again, with his brothers and his step-mother. Except back then there had been tables and chairs and TV sounds, and now there was fire, dirt, and stilted conversation.

The guards had tried to start something with them, _after_ the altercation with Mal. To be fair, Harry had done little to diffuse the situation. Surprisingly, Doug had been the one saying to lay off them.

Everyone was tired.

Uma, when she woke, was in a bad mood; she waved off Desi's and Jonas's attempts at conversation.

Harry had clearly been reluctant to allow Jonas and Gonzo to follow them back to base, but he had conceded, "Uma wants them. And if we're at war with the heroes, a captain needs a crew." Then he hadn't spoken until Uma woke back up.

Gil turned the fish over the fire and forced his eyes to stay open as his body still experienced the phantom feelings of being carried by a current, submerged in water. It was a mopey night, and thinking about his _old_ family made him remember things like being shoved around by Gaston Jr., or being pushed behind his step-mom's back as monsters closed in on them....

Uma cleared her throat. "You all were great today. You did great."

They all looked up at her for more, some with particular hunger for praise when they all felt so spent, but she was silent for a while, making shapes in the dirt with her finger. Her hair was still damp, and it had tangled together in a way that would have to be dealt with some other time. Harry wearily half-leaned on her to watch her draw, and she allowed it. Then:

"We're going to town tomorrow; we need stuff."

Gil supposed sometimes it was enough to know that there was something next.

That this was just a single bad day.

That tomorrow, they would run through streets and laughingly break rules, and there would be new shirts and stolen candy bars.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Even better, they robbed a whole gumball machine.

Gonzo took it apart, more like. He was a son of Hephaestus, and the meager contraption was putty in his hands.

They stocked up on gumballs and chewed until their jaws were sore.

They were chased by security men, who tripped on the spilled gumballs, and Desi had to be carried over someone's shoulder, she laughed so hard.

They had left Doug at base but taken all of the bags with them. He was still there when they got back. Uma cut him free of his ropes that night, and he left them quietly.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

It seemed like the blink of an eye before it was winter already, and so freezing cold that they all slept practically on top of each other, and whoever stayed up to watch for monsters also tended to the fire.

Since there were six of them, now, they pirated in small groups (pairs or trios), deep in the woods since the guards still watched the barrier. The campers were sort of used to them, now, anyway. Gil robbed Chad for the third time early that December, and the boy just sighed and handed over his satchel with a request that they not take his compact this time. ("It's new, and you already took back the other one!")

It snowed.

Gil ran into Desi standing with her face against the barrier, staring down at the beauty of the snow-covered camp, her nose reddening from the cold. He didn't mention it again, just walked with her back to base when she was ready to leave. She kept her hair braided, now, like Uma's.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

True to her word, Uma took them all to a movie one day, with the money they saved up. Well, stole. With the money they stole.

Gonzo, Harry, and Desi talked through the whole thing. Gil almost choked on a popcorn kernel. Jonas stole a backpack-full of toilet paper from the theater bathroom.

"You're my favorite," Uma said to Jonas, then reminded Harry that she was kidding.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Carlos actually _rode_ the chariot he designed.

He _raced_ it.

Mal stood at the sidelines to watch, between Evie, who lost her voice cheering him on, and Jay, who whooped delightedly and pumped his fist in approval. Mal sabotaged his opponents with magic.

They all had their ways of supporting their friend.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

At some point, in the December-January-February-March blur of unpleasant weather, when she was alone with Harry and Gil, Uma found herself asking, "Wait, how old are we now?"

Harry laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still love comments! And I love all of you! Make sure to drink some water and give yourself at least five compliments before you go to sleep!
> 
> Also, if you couldn't tell from the artsy time lapses, they'll become teenagers at some point in, if not by the very beginning of, the next chapter.


	5. Controlling the Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Positive reinforcement makes me happy! XD
> 
> But seriously, thank you guys for your comments, especially the super specific ones! You're a darn great readership! (And also please keep commenting.)

Jonas was a legacy of Apollo on his mother's side and, more directly, a son of Deimos, god of terror.

For him, that meant that he experienced the feeling of fear differently than other people did. (Still as an emotion, and still as something he couldn't completely control, but, as he had once explained it to Gonzo, he could feel its mechanics, its edges and inner workings, simultaneously with its symptoms.) It meant that his childhood had been so full of horror movies that he had a near-encyclopedic knowledge of them, backwards and forwards. (Any woman who would knowingly bed the god of terror was of course a fan of horror movies. His mother loved being scared. Or she used to...) It meant that he seemed to naturally invoke feelings ranging from unease to outright panic in others, which in turn meant that he attracted fewer monsters but more 911 calls than most demigods. It meant that he had had upward of three, but definitely not as much as ten, campers pee their pants when he robbed them. And it meant that Uma was the first ever person to look him directly in the eye (without shuddering or wincing) when first meeting him.

That was what it meant for _him_.

For Uma, it meant that her first mate started to get nightmares.

Bad ones.

It took them a few nights to fully understand that Jonas was the cause. Harry still didn't seem to believe it even once the rest of them did.

"It's not Jonas's bloody aura," he insisted, roughly and through a cracking voice, on a night when his nightmares had him screaming out the names of both of his sisters and waking everybody up. "I'm going mad. Like the satyr said about madness..."

"Harry." Uma took hold of his shoulder. "You don't think, if you were going crazy, I'd _notice_ and tell you?"

He didn't answer; just met her gaze the way he had whenever she'd found him bruised in his home- in James Hook's home. All fear and fury and fragility and flimsy defiance. His fingers were white around his hook, and his eyes were like the trembling blue flames from her mother's old stovetop.

"I don't think Doug really meant it," Gil added. "He was just annoyed that we kidnapped him."

"He didn't have to mean it," Harry said grimly. "Not if Mum meant it."

"Nemesis isn't cursing you," Uma said. She glanced at the others, then stood up and gestured for Harry to take a walk with her. "Go to sleep," she ordered the crew and Gil as she strode away. "Desi, you're guarding."

"Aw man," Desiree complained sleepily.

Uma and Harry hiked away in silence for awhile. She didn't look at him, but she listened for the sound of his breathing evening out. Being in motion always did seem to help him, especially now that he was moving out of range of Jonas's aura. Uma slowed their pace to a near-crawl once she heard that he was comparatively calm.

"Better?" she asked.

He sighed but didn't say anything.

"Harry," she prompted, turning around to find him stone-faced with tears gleaming, unshed, in his eyes. "Harry."

He hugged her, suddenly, like a Venus fly trap closing, and his muscles were tense as his breath turned hiccuppy.

Uma drew in what air she could, in his desperate grip. "Harry." _Can't you say anything else? Some captain you are._ But she was a little shaken; he was never like this. He had been raw plenty of times, but not this raw. She raised one of her hands to push him back a step, and he retreated that one step obediently. "What was the dream?" she asked, since there was nothing else to ask, and they were both too stunted to really engage the problem on the battlefield of emotion.

"The Furies," he breathed.

She nodded. It was often the Furies. The Furies, or Hook, or some more recent, particularly impactful monster.

"You know if those hags ever tried to touch you, I'd cut them to ribbons," Uma said clearly.

Harry nodded. "I know. So would I. But it doesn't happen that way in the dreams."

And then Uma was certain of a solution so simple and obvious (if it worked) that it had to be either cheating or "divine" intervention.

She dug into her pocket and removed the Olympian coal. "Take this," she ordered.

He did.

"Sleep with it in your pocket. See if that helps keep the dreams away."

"Your barmy god-coal?" Harry said skeptically. His voice shook, though, more than it was supposed to for the snark to sound natural, and his hand trembled as he navigated the coal into his pocket.

"We'll see if it works. If it doesn't, we'll try something else. Got it?"

He nodded.

"Hey. Look at me."

He did.

Then he looked over her head.

And his expression turned to panic. "LOOK OUT!"

She turned just in time for something scaly and heavy to fly into her chest, pinning her to the ground, driving the air from her lungs, and tearing her shirt and skin with awful talons. Harry kicked it off of her, then swore in pain; he had broken at least one toe on the creature's dense body. Uma sprang to her feet- something in her torso was either bruised or cracked -and whipped out a knife, but Harry was already snarling and dashing (foot injury noticed but ignored) to confront the creature that had hurt them. Uma stood back for just a second and let him get a head start on his son-of-Nemesis revenge thing, taking the opportunity to figure out a way of breathing that didn't hurt.

It was a type of monster they had killed a million times before, and they killed it just fine once again, but it reminded them that they couldn't indulge in things like emotional discussions. They couldn't stand still and cry. They weren't cozy campers, even now, with their increased numbers.

She and Harry walked back to camp, her bleeding and with gigantic slashes in her shirt that she would care about later, and Harry limping with his hand over the lump in his pocket, both of them the slightest bit emotionally hardened. The last thing Uma said to him that night was "Try to snap out of it, okay?"

He grunted in acknowledgement and gave her his shirt to sleep in.

The coal kept Harry's nightmares away. Lack of the coal brought Uma's bizarre dreams back, and the mysterious voice with them, as casually as if it had never left. She didn't have full conversations with it usually, but every night, as her dreams placed her in some city or land that she had never seen (often temples to the gods, or places that had functioned as Mount Olympus in the past), it would greet her, _"Captain."_ And she would call it by some rude nickname in return, to assert dominance. It usually seemed amused with her, which she did not appreciate.

But on the whole, she became comfortable with the dreams, and with the mysterious voice.

She still grilled it relentlessly about who it was and why she heard it. The questioning never got her anywhere, but she kept it up, albeit with more and more gaps in-between bouts of interrogation as they grew more familiar.

She barely noticed when, over the months that followed, it slowly started to greet her as "Uma" instead of as "Captain".

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

"You look stupid."

"Shut up and hold the compact still."

"Okay, but you look stupid."

Harry was so focused on applying the eyeliner, his only reply was a half-hearted, "You _are_ stupid, Stupid."

Desiree rolled her eyes but did not stop holding up the mirror for him. "You're putting on too much. You look like a fudging raccoon."

"I like it," Harry said simply.

Gil dropped down next to him, tossing an apple between his hands. "I do, too," he said brightly. "It looks cool."

"You look like a maniac," Jonas chimed in.

Harry dropped the eyeliner pencil and grabbed, instead, his hook to jab in Jonas's general direction. Jonas raised his hands in surrender and said no more about Harry's new look.

Desiree snapped the compact shut. "Wait til Uma wakes up."

"Lemme see?" Gonzo asked, crawling over to get a look, but Harry batted him away:

"Stop crowding me."

They were about thirteen and fourteen, except Gonzo and Jonas were both fifteen. Harry's voice had begun to crack sporadically, so he deliberately growled words more often than he said them normally, which Desiree said made him sound like he was pooping and Uma laughed at, to his chagrin. Gil just allowed his own voice to crack, and was known to stop mid-sentence with an expression of mild surprise whenever it happened.

Uma woke up a few minutes later. (It had become near-impossible to interrupt her dreams until they were done; they had discovered this. Where before she could be shaken awake if necessary, now she had to be actively pulled to her feet before she could respond to her surroundings. It was an unsettling change, but not one that they could do anything about, short of splashing water on her, which Uma forbade under most circumstances because it was a waste of their water, or Harry giving her the coal back, which Uma forbade in general because it was hazardous to _everyone's_ sleep.)

"Crap," Uma muttered as she sat up, nursing a headache, which had _also_ become a regular side-effect of her dreams (and which were apparently _much_ worse when she was forced awake; another reason to just let the dreams run their course).

"Morning, Captain," Gonzo said promptly. He was probably the best, out of all of them, at being an underling; for as much as each of them had their different, strange kinds of adoration for Uma, Jonas was too argumentative, Desiree was too immature (despite being roughly their age), Gil needed too much to be explicitly told things, and Harry...well, his respect for Uma was unquestionable at this point, but he prioritized her wellbeing over her rank and would defy her if it became absolutely necessary.

"Harry and me stole an apple for you," Gil said excitedly, then practically beamed the apple at Uma's head. Her hand shot up to catch it even as she was still reeling from her "dream hangover". "It's red and everything."

Uma bit into it gratefully, then noticed Harry's face. "You look like a maniac," she said with an appreciative smirk. She pointed to the eyeliner. "Guessing that was from a daughter of Aphrodite?"

"Aye," he said through a wide grin that might or might not have been due to her praise.

It was no secret that Harry actively targeted the campers from the cabins of their four enemies. He always told the Aphrodite kids, "And y'tell Evie I said hi, will you?" The camper from whom they'd just pilfered the eyeliner and apple, a girl with light brown skin and a fluffy ponytail, had rolled her eyes and breezily said, "I don't carry messages," before flouncing off. Gil had thought it was funny.

"He put too much on," Desi said loftily, still sending critical glances at Harry's eyeliner.

"He'll scare some heroes like that; that's for sure," Uma said, then continued the process of reducing her apple to a core. (Harry stuck his tongue out at Desi, who stuck hers out back.)

Now that she was awake, Gonzo started working a can open for breakfast; unlike the rest of them, he could pop them open with almost no effort.

"So, Gil, Jonas, Desi- you're all on pirating rounds today. Harry, Zo- you're with me." Uma wiped the apple's juice from her face with her sleeve.

"What'll we be doing?" Harry asked while Gonzo just nodded subordinately. "Heading into town, or satyr hunting?"

"Please say town!" Gil said. "I'm outgrowing everything. My pants are so tight."

"Wear some of Jonas's. And satyr hunting," Uma said.

"Hey!" Jonas protested, his frightening aura (unbeknownst to him, probably) thickening with his irritation, but Uma just shot him a flatly challenging look, which shut him up; he was still unused to people calmly asserting themselves against him.

"But the satyrs never tell us _anything,"_ Gil whined.

Uma made a face that clearly said that she was harnessing all of her patience not to snap anything in response. Gil's shortage in tact did not interact well with their ever-increasing teenage moodiness. And anyway, it wasn't quite true that her tactic of ambushing satyrs to grill them about why gods faded had "never" brought results; one satyr had let slip that Pan had been in something called "the Labyrinth" when he'd faded, and had scoffed out a negative when Uma asked, "So, gods die if they go in this 'Labyrinth'?". Not incredibly helpful, but more than they'd known before.

Uma wished that she hadn't let Doug go before getting all the information she wanted out of him. That was her fault, exercising mercy like that. Stupid mistake.

"We haven't messed with the satyrs in a while," she said. "They're probably not avoiding us anymore. Or at least they've gotten sloppy."

"Can I go with you?" Desiree asked, in the tone of a small child wheedling for a cookie out of the cookie jar. "In case you run into Doug again?"

"No, you're on pirating rounds."

"She _said_ you're on pirating rounds," Harry echoed, with a smug look.

Desiree made an obscene gesture at him.

"First mate," Harry reminded, pointing to himself. "Say you're sorry."

"So-rry," Desiree sang out, while rolling her eyes to highlight her impenitence.

Gonzo handed Uma the opened food can, and she, having already eaten an apple, handed it on to Harry.

"I wanna see the satyrs up close again," Gonzo contributed. "It's so freaky how they balance on those little hooves. Like, get feet, right?" He chuckled.

"It's their _bodies_ ," Jonas said, although this wasn't the first time they'd had this conversation and Harry shared a _Here they go again_ look with Gil while handing him the can of food. "They're used to it, because it's just how they're made."

"But it _has_ to take more energy to balance like that," Gonzo insisted, "right? Their muscles, here," (He gestured at his midriff.) "must be different, right?"

"So what?" Desiree sighed, throwing her head back in overdramatized exasperation.

"So, no machine should be doing more work than it has to," Gonzo said. (Jonas mouthed it along with him; they had had this exact argument _so_ many times.) "Why do they walk on such a tiny area? Why are they made that way?"

"Ask Prometheus, bruh."

"Prometheus didn't make satyrs, you idiot; he made humans."

"Who cares?"

"There it is: No one cares about the identity of the craftsman."

"The crafts _person,"_ Desiree interjected.

Harry looked over in the hopes that Uma was going to tell Gonzo or Jonas to shut up about the stupid satyrs, but she just looked amused with the two older boys, which...bothered him more than it probably should have. He grabbed the compact roughly from Desiree (earning himself a smack in the shoulder, which he ignored) and checked his eyeliner in the mirror.

Later, when breakfast was done, they split ways for their tasks of the day.

They hiked _down_ the hill; it would be easier to follow satyr tracks where the trees weren't so close together, and satyrs often guided lost half-bloods to the camp.

Uma walked with her sword in hand and smiled as she ran her fingers over it. It was a real sword, not one of the old, possibly-enchanted knives from Ursula's kitchen; they had stolen it from a camper. _Harry_ had stolen it for her, and it delighted him that it delighted her, that she still smiled absently when she was holding it. It was like a snapshot of some other life where they could do amazing things for each other, give amazing gifts.

He tripped over a raised tree root, stumbled rather far, and Gonzo snorted out a laugh at his expense that was met with an annoyed shove.

In hindsight, it occurred to Harry that Gil likely would have been better-suited to downhill forest prowling. But then, if Uma had taken Gil with her and left either Harry or Gonzo to pirate with Desiree and Jonas...well, Harry couldn't stand to be with Jonas in small groups for very long (Now that he thought about it, Uma never did ask him to group with Jonas for anything.), and between Jonas, Desiree, and Gonzo, there was bound to be _some_ explosive argument to keep them from being productive, hence sending Gil in as a sort of coolant.

Meanwhile, on pirating rounds:

"How can you both not like horses?" Gil demanded.

Desiree grinned smugly, finally not outnumbered in that regard.

"They spook too easy," Jonas said with a shrug. "I don't like animals that don't like me."

"What animals _do_ like you?" Desi asked, weaving a strand of grass into one of her braids for no discernible reason.

"Cats," Jonas answered readily, then didn't elaborate.

They spent some time walking in silence.

Gil was leading the way, technically; in the wilderness, he was strangely adept at finding or avoiding people, and while Jonas's slightly unsettling aura muddied that sense a bit, he was still worth following in these situations.

A squirrel raced through the trees overhead, startling Desi slightly, and Gil couldn't help thinking about what Uma had once said to him: that the squirrels could be reporting back to his mother, to Artemis. Did the squirrels think he was a good tracker? Would she believe the squirrels if they told her he wasn't? Or would she give him the benefit of the doubt? The squirrels were biased, anyway; he killed them regularly, for meat. Artemis would understand that, definitely. Definitely, she would understand.

Gil simultaneously saw, felt, smelled, and heard (but not tasted, interestingly) that someone was close by, and he held up a hand to still the others, then put up two fingers. Both of the crew members stopped, Jonas putting on his serious face (which gave Gil the chills) and Desi grinning because she _loved_ to intimidate people. They were established enough, now, that she didn't have to climb trees or sneak attack when they took on particularly small groups; their win record wasn't perfect, but it still usually spoke for itself.

Slowly, they eased forward: Gil soundless as always, Desi reasonably light on her feet, and Jonas a near-agonizing cacophony of underfoot crackles, to Gil's ears.

The boy they came upon as they passed through the trees was...well, boyish. With brown hair and focused eyes. There was something oddly _soft_ about his disposition, so much so that even Gil noticed. Not weak, but soft. On first glance, he was unarmed, and on first glance, he was alone, and this made all of them suspicious; Gil had been sure that there were two people here, and who would travel through the woods unarmed and alone when everyone knew about the pirates who dwelled here?

But he _wasn't_ traveling through, Jonas noticed. He was waiting.

"Hi," the boy said, running a soft brown gaze over each of them in turn (dipping his gaze and tensing around the shoulders a bit when his eyes ran over Jonas, because aura). _Uma's_ eyes were brown, but her gaze defaulted to a sharpness that made one feel acutely alive. Uma's eyes were deep and intense, shaped like sad songs and only ever yielding if she loved you. This boy had eyes like a lullaby. Not bad, but different. "I'm Ben. Are you the pirates?"

Jonas pointed a knife at Ben. "Wanna find out?" At the same time, Gil warily but amiably said, "Hi, Ben."

Both Jonas and Desiree shot Gil exasperated looks.

"What? He introduced himself," Gil rationalized faintly. He was the tracker, but he left the interaction with their prey up to literally anyone else.

"I don't want to fight," Ben said. "I don't have a sword or anything; I just want to talk."

Desiree laughed at him. She, too, had her knife in hand. "Turn out your pockets, Talky Boy." (Alright, _almost_ literally anyone else; for all her enthusiasm, Desi's name-calling was flawed to say the least.)

Ben actually did turn out his pockets. They were empty. "I don't think you deserve to be stranded out here," Ben continued. "Not over what your parents did."

"Join the club," Desiree said, frowning slightly in confusion.

"But I think someone should do something," Ben tried again.

The three of them exchanged perplexed looks.

"If you've got something to say, you have to say it to our captain," Gil said, trying to sound authoritative.

"Yeah!" Desi agreed.

"Your captain," Ben said, with a little excited smile as if he hadn't expected to get this far. "That's Uma, right?"

"Why do you know her name?" Jonas asked.

"My fr-...uh..." Ben seemed to revise his sentence mid-word. "My fellow camp members have discussed you."

It took a second, but all of a sudden it all clicked for Gil. He _knew_ the name "Ben". Not as well as the other names, but this was still one of the ones on Harry's grudge list. "OH! You're the one who let Mal in! The son of Zeus!"

Desiree looked surprised, then hostile. She had been in their company long enough, now, to have acquired a cache of resentment for all Uma's and Harry's ex-friends. She pointed _her_ knife and took long steps toward Ben, stopping when the distance between them was roughly halved. "You're that stupid witch's boyfriend?"

"I'd...rather you didn't call her that, but yes."

"She betrayed Uma. She left them behind, and you helped her do it. They could've died out here."

"I know." Ben's eyes shone with apology. "That's what I'm trying to fix, if I can."

It occurred to Gil that this was his first _big_ task as second mate: bringing the son of Zeus to Uma. He knew that Harry would be enraged to meet "Baby Lightning", but Uma? Gil couldn't help but to break into a smile. "Right this way, Ben," he said. "Uma talks about you heroes _all_ the time."

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

"Take it back!"

"I said what I said."

"This is so, so dumb," Uma said flatly.

Harry and Gonzo had wound up in a whispered argument that was heated on Harry's end and mostly amused on Gonzo's. (Zo was shorter than Harry, and slower in a fight, but he was also pretty much fearless, as a consequence of having known Jonas for so long.)

With a betrayed look and a finger pointed indignantly at Gonzo, Harry protested, "He's a liar! He said I have acne."

"You do," Uma sighed. "So do I. Who cares?"

"I do not," Harry said uncertainly, his fingers starting to roam the skin of his face. "I don't...Well, when did this start up, then?" he demanded.

Uma was torn between laughter and irritation, but she kept her expression as smooth as their adolescent skin decidedly wasn't. "It just happened, you dork. It just happens."

Harry kept feeling around his face, as if he didn't recognize it. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't think it mattered to you," she answered, fluttering her fingers idly on the hilt of her sword. "If you're that bothered, keep hitting up the Aphrodite kids; I'm sure at least one has makeup or skin cream or whatever."

"The one you got the eyeliner from should've had concealer, right?" Gonzo prompted.

"She's not my complexion," Harry said grumpily. He let his hands down from his face and trudged along.

Uma shrugged and kept her eyes on the tracks they were following: amid the generous dusting of human footprints and shoeprints (The campers really were everywhere, weren't they?), the deeper indents of hooves in dirt.

"Their tracks sink in more," Gonzo observed, "because all their weight goes into those two points. Pulling their hooves out of the dirt has to offset their balance, right? And they don't have toes-"

"Nobody cares, Gonzo," Harry said.

"Don't be moody over some acne," Uma said.

"What're you always on his side for?" Harry demanded.

"I'm not 'always' on anyone's side," Uma replied, a little louder and turning to face him full on. His temper was igniting her temper.

"He and Jonas got to argue all through breakfast; I say 'no one cares' and I get in trouble," Harry griped.

"Gods, so I have to act the same in every situation?" Uma shot back. "Stop acting so insecure."

"If you ask me-"

"No one asked you, Gonzo," Uma interrupted. "Stay out of it and follow the tracks."

Wisely, he did, leaving the captain and first mate behind. 

Uma crossed her arms. "So?" she prompted lowly.

"So what?" Harry asked, his gaze downturned like a scolded child but his jaw set hard.

"So, what's been chewing your balls all day?"

He snickered just a little at the unexpected turn of phrase, but he returned to moping rather quickly. "Dunno," he answered.

"Well, knock it off 'til you figure it out," Uma said, shoving his shoulder a little.

Rather than jokingly overreacting to the push, he stood still and solid. She was mildly surprised, both by his fidelity to this bad mood and by his physical strength in not even stumbling. But the bad mood was what she focused on.

"Do you have a problem with me right now?" she asked. "Are you angry about something?"

Harry's eyebrows unfurrowed. "No. What d'you mean? I'm not angry."

"You're acting angry."

"Am not."

"You are too, and stubborn."

"Am n-..." He broke off, seeming to see her point. "I dunno." He cast his eyes around to be sure that no one was nearby, then quietly added, "Sorry."

There was a wrinkle between her eyebrows as she warily appraised him. Then she turned away. "Come on; let's catch up with Gonzo."

They power-walked farther uphill. They were nearing the little depression in the ground that had been their hideout back when they first acquired Jonas and Gonzo. (They had changed bases twice since then.)

The hoof-prints grew closer together. "It slowed down," Uma observed.

"And stood still awhile," Gonzo added, placing a casual hand on Uma's shoulder and pointing out a set of prints that were noticeably-deeper than the others.

Uma shoved his hand off but nodded in agreement. "Yeah, he stopped. Probably not for too long."

"Got lost?" Harry suggested, and his tone was brighter now. (Uma sent him a perplexed look; these teenage mood swings were really something.)

"Satyrs normally don't get lost in these woods," she said, and he shrugged unaffectedly.

"Uma, look," Gonzo said, seemingly-reflexively about to reach for her shoulder again before remembering not to and bringing his hand back down. "The human footprints get deeper here, too."

She looked and found that he was right. Her shoulders dropped in disappointment. "They were together. He was bringing campers in."

"Doesn't mean he's still with them," Harry pointed out, a mischievous smile lifting one corner of his mouth.

Uma thought it over a second, then smiled back wickedly. "Come on."

They kept following the tracks. Strangely, they seemed to be making a direct path to the pirates' old hideaway. Uma raised a hand for caution while they advanced still further.

With a sword, she pushed aside the branches obscuring the familiar spot, and suddenly they were faced with four children and a satyr.

"Doug?" Uma demanded, not lowering her sword. "What are you doing back here?"

"I was looking for you," Doug answered, raising his hands defensively but in no way seeming afraid that she would hurt him. You let someone go, and they stop fearing you.

"Looking for us?" Harry repeated dangerously. "What d'you mean?"

Uma looked around while Harry and Gonzo took over the intimidation stance. The four kids were rough-looking, some of them injured, and grimy to different degrees. Mostly, they cowered behind Doug, but one stood beside him: a short, broad-set girl with brown skin, austerely-cropped hair, and extremely loose-fitting clothes. She stood ready for a fight, and she was glaring at three of them, the kind of glare that Uma knew came _only_ from fear.

"It's my job to guide demigods to camp. I met _these_ guys, they're cursed...and I couldn't leave them. We're supposed to, but I couldn't. And I knew that you wouldn't, either."

Uma looked at the kids again. Yeah, they were probably cursed; they looked like they had been out on their own for a long time, and like they were much less capable at defending themselves than she and Harry had been. The brave girl at Doug's side still stood strong, but her expression was crumbling a bit, her lip trembling. Uma noticed a scar through one of her eyebrows.

Alright.

Uma pointed a finger at Doug sternly. "First of all, you don't know me, Goat Man." Then she slid her gaze back over to the girl. "What's your name?"

The girl hardened her glare but answered, "Bonny. Daughter of Bellona."

"Bellona?" Uma repeated, unused to hearing names of gods she did not know.

"Roman," Doug said gravely. "Warrior goddess. We're not supposed to mix children of the gods' Greek and Roman forms, but there was nowhere else for her to go, and I knew that you-"

"Stop saying you know me," Uma said. "Bonny...c'mere."

Bonny looked wary, but she walked over.

Uma handed her sword to Harry, then demonstrated an unarmed fighting stance. "If you don't have a weapon, you want to stand like _this_. Your stance was fine for power and not getting knocked over, but when the other person has a weapon, sometimes you have to follow the path of _their_ movements instead of just standing strong against them. Let them knock you over, then roll between their legs; stuff like that. You're shorter than me, some-friggin'-how, and that'll either be an advantage or a disadvantage. It depends on how you use it."

"My father taught me to never let anyone make me fall," Bonny said firmly.

"It's not about not falling; it's about controlling when and how you do fall," Uma said. "Harry, attack me."

Harry looked at the sword that had been placed in his hand, then shrugged and complied, albeit at about half the speed he would use to fight a real enemy. Uma followed his forward momentum by backing up, then diving under the blade and suddenly advancing so that she was closer to his body than the sword was. Harry shoved her to the ground, keeping his legs close together so she couldn't roll between them as she'd told Bonny she would. Uma allowed herself to be shoved and to fall, landing in a deliberate crouch, and swiped his legs out from under him entirely, stealing the sword from his loosened grip as he fell and positioning its tip under his chin when he sat up. She grinned at him, and he slowly grinned back, his eyes wide and wild with something that she didn't have a name for but that made something in her chest tickle not-unpleasantly.

"Like that," she told Bonny, a little late. She brought the blade away from Harry's chin, but he kept kneeling, seeming to forget that standing was even an option.

Bonny's eyebrows were furrowed as she considered the maneuver she had just witnessed. She mimicked one of Uma's swift dodging movements and shook her head. "I don't know if I can do that. I almost never let enemies move me."

"Then you're burned butter when you meet an enemy who's stronger than you," Uma said.

"I just won't let them be stronger than me, then," Bonny said flatly.

Uma smirked at the girl's nerve. She unbelted a knife from her side and handed it to Bonny. "Here. If you're too dumb to learn a lesson, I hope you're not too dumb to carry a weapon."

Bonny took the knife with alacrity, running her fingertips lightly along the object's edge and smiling for the first time. The gift of self-defense had been given to her, and she knew it.

Uma looked at the others. "And you three?" she prompted.

They were a blond girl with smudges on her face and an old-looking bandage around her upper arm, an Asian boy with similarly-overused bandages on his hands and fingers and the facial expression of a stray cat hiding under a porch, and a brown-skinned girl with her hair tied back in a puff who was looking fairly dizzy.

Uma focused on the dizzy one; dizzy was rarely a good sign. "Are you okay?" she asked the girl.

Doug took it upon himself to answer. "She got-" (He faltered very briefly when Uma's gaze landed on him again, hard.) "-hit in the ear by a blast of air. Rogue wind spirit, I think."

"Does she need ambrosia?" Uma asked.

"Probably not," Doug said.

"Are we actually taking them in?" Gonzo interjected.

Harry finally rose to his feet.

Uma stood silent for a few seconds, ruminating, before turning to Gonzo and replying, "What do you mean? They're part of the crew." She met Harry's gaze, ready for disappointment or exasperation, but he only nodded.

"It's a miracle they survived this long," he said frankly.

"You really saw a bunch of cursed kids and decided to bring them to us?" Uma said to Doug.

"I don't...care for the fact that you kidnapped me," Doug disclosed.

"Borrowed, but go on," Uma said.

"...but you guys protect each other, and I don't know that there's anything else like that out there for them."

"But _you_ , though," Uma specified. "You saw that they needed help and you brought them here? Since when are you friends-of-the-camp decent to cursed-borns?"

"My job is to be a protector of half-bloods," Doug said, his eyes trained downward but his gaze somewhat sharp. "That's what I'm doing; protecting them. Or...taking them to someone who will."

"We've seen a lot of satyrs ignore the entire crap out of us when we were on our own," Uma said, in the calm, quiet tone that one might use while staring at a rising sun. "You were probably one of them, letting us flounder. Finding the not-cursed half-bloods instead."

Doug's mouth twitched. "It was how things were," he said weakly. "But now I guess I think about it...more."

Uma nodded slowly. "Change in perspective," she ventured slyly, "like when Pan died."

"Faded," Doug corrected, but he seemed too lost in his mind and his guilt to really be listening. Perfect.

"When that happened, you probably had to make some changes, too," Uma probed.

Doug nodded briskly. "For a while we didn't believe it. Then all the satyrs eventually started taking it upon ourselves to care for the wild. It's what we should have been doing before. If we had, maybe he wouldn't have-..." Doug trailed off.

Uma could feel Harry and Gonzo looking at her in victorious incredulity, but she kept herself from visibly glowing in triumph. Doug didn't have to know how much he had just given them. "Well," she said casually, "thank you for your sudden decency, then."

Doug looked back up at her with moist eyes. Then he looked around at his charges. "Go with them," he urged the young, scared demigods.

Bonny was the first to comply.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

"You don't really have to use the knives," Ben said. "I'm going with you willingly."

This was true; though Desi and Jonas kept their knives out to urge him along, Ben was walking unbotheredly in their company as Gil navigated them back to base.

"And then if you run away, we have to tell Uma that we lost you," Desiree said.

"Why would I run away?" Ben asked, but his tone wasn't harsh; it sounded like he was trying to talk them through it. "I was waiting for you. I _want_ to talk to Uma."

"Circumstantial," Jonas said, which was a very long word that Gil was pretty sure he had never heard before. "The knives stay out; we're not friends."

"Okay. Not friends," Ben said. Very agreeable. "But maybe not enemies?"

"We'll see what Uma says," Desiree responded.

"You're all very loyal to her," Ben observed.

"She's awesome," Desiree told him firmly. "And she saved my life a bazillion times."

If Ben was surprised by Desiree's childish way of expressing herself, he didn't show it. "I have some friends like that."

They walked in silence for a while.

Gil tried to ignore the annoying impression that there were more people here than he could see. One more. It was in the resonance of the footsteps, the feeling of the air, and yet...they were the only ones here. Was his brain broken?

"So, your dad is Zeus," Jonas said.

"Yeah," Ben sighed. "That's another reason I want to meet Uma, actually; we're basically cousins."

"And you've never met her?" Desi said.

"Not really. At least, I don't think I have. When Mal, Evie, Carlos, and Jay first made the trip to camp, they split into two groups to keep the monster attacks at bay." (Gil nodded along absently; he had heard this story.) "The first group was Mal with Evie and Carlos, while Jay and Uma and Harry took a more roundabout path. I was being brought to camp by a satyr at the same time, so we- I mean, me and the satyr and Evie and Carlos and Mal -took most of the journey together. We all grew pretty close." Ben smiled at the memory, then his smile faltered. "When we started getting close to the hill, the satyr took me aside and told me that Mal was cursed. Satyrs can tell that sort of thing. I didn't even have time to believe him, though, because then there was this monster and we all had to run up the hill. But then Mal couldn't get into camp." Ben pursed his lips. "She was in danger, and I had gotten to like her...I asked Father to let her in, and he did."

"And you couldn't do that for Uma and Harry?" Gil said, and he didn't even sound accusatory, but rather deeply hurt on his friends' behalf.

"I..." Ben also sounded pained. "I should have. But I was young, and whenever anyone had brought Uma or Harry up, the whole way to camp, all I'd heard about them was that there had been some fight and Mal felt awful and Mal wasn't looking forward to seeing them again. And then when Evie and Carlos went to help guide Jay and Harry and Uma to camp, they came back with Jay, and they were all saying that Harry and Uma attacked them for going into camp without them. I was young, and I didn't see all the perspectives; I didn't even really _think_ about asking Zeus to help them. I just knew that my friends didn't want to see them."

Gil's expression arranged itself into a strange sort of pout. "Jay broke Harry's arm, in that fight," he said, in a tone like he wasn't quite sure why he was saying this out loud but felt compelled to anyway. "And it stormed the night after, they said; it stormed for a long time. They hid in a grocery store to keep out of the rain until they were kicked out of there, too. They got sick from the cold and wet; that was when Uma learned how to keep the water from touching them. It made her too weak to move."

"I didn't know that," Ben said soberly.

"Harry remembers it extra well because he's a son of Nemesis," Gil said. "When people hurt him or someone he loves, it's sharp in his memory until he pays it back."

Ben gulped a little.

"We'll be there in another few minutes," Gil added a bit more brightly, clapping Ben on the back because he did seem like an alright guy.

"This should be interesting," Jonas muttered.

"I hope it's like with Doug," Desiree said, reaching up to bat at some tree branches for no reason, "and we get to keep him as our prisoner."

"Wait, what?" Ben said, not quite alarmed but clearly caught off guard.

"Oh, should we tie him up now?" Jonas asked, ignoring Ben's words.

"The rope is in my backpack," Gil said, shrugging. "Desi, can you...?"

Desiree was already scrambling over to remove the rope from the bag. "Got it!"

"Wait," Ben said again, frowning slightly as Jonas pinned his arms behind his back. "Do you absolutely have to do this?"

"Not sure," said Gil candidly. "If Uma says to untie you, we'll untie you."

 **"Or better yet..."** That was another voice. A voice coming from nowhere.

Or, more accurately, it was a voice that came from the exact empty space that Gil had been _sure_ another person was occupying.

The incomplete sentence was their only warning before all three of the pirates were blown back from Ben, each in a different direction; Gil caught sight of Desiree tumbling downhill before running into a tree which ironically stopped her descent.

By the time they were all on their feet and had their bearings, both Ben and the invisible being that had been accompanying them all this way had vanished.

"That was the witch, wasn't it?" Jonas said.

"It was her voice; I could tell," Desiree agreed.

"The witch stole our prisoner!"

"Or maybe he was trying to lead her to our base. Maybe it was all a big plan to spy on us."

"I don't think it was," Gil said. "Ben seemed like he kind of cared, I think, and why would Mal have taken him away if they had a plan?"

"Well, now we've got nothing to bring Uma," Jonas said. "We haven't even robbed anybody." After a beat of pause, he added, "Yet."

Both Gil and Desiree pointed a forefinger at Jonas in agreement with his sentiment.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

"Mal," Ben sighed as soon as they were back at camp. "Why did you do that?"

Mal was stumbling dizzily over her own feet; it was almost impossible to walk well while invisible, and suddenly becoming visible always made her a bit confused, balance-wise. She caught hold of a table's edge to steady herself, (They were in a side room of the Big House, where they could talk privately.) and Ben placed a hand on her arm to help with that even though he was clearly in a decidedly un-romantic mood.

"They were going to tie you up," Mal said. "I saved you."

"I wanted to talk to Uma," Ben insisted. "I _told_ you I wanted to talk to her, and I told you I didn't want anyone to follow-"

"Well, sue me," Mal said, throwing up her hands. "I can't let my boyfriend take on six scary pirates by himself."

"You used magic to make me do what you wanted," Ben pressed. _"Again."_

"It's not something I do all the time," Mal protested, and she could feel her voice climbing octaves, but she couldn't help it; it wasn't fair to cast her as some villain in all of this. She was only doing her best!

"Yes you do," Ben said, and the awful thing was that he didn't yell or speak unkindly; his angry voice was just a more strained, less refined version of how he regularly spoke. "You use the Mist to turn my papers invisible when you want my attention-"

"Listen to yourself! No one our age should have 'papers'!"

"You cast illusions of yourself when you want me to think you're with me but don't want to actually be with me-"

"I do _want_ to be with you, but sometimes I can't."

"Then don't cast illusions," Ben said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the entire world. "You can just be honest with me."

"I'm sorry I'm not very good at...being honest with feelings," Mal said. "But you're in over your head with this Uma thing. I underestimated her last time I saw her, and I'm not going to let you do the s-"

"That's not up to you!" This time, Ben _did_ almost shout, and Mal could feel her eyes instantly moistening. Through the blur, she saw Ben regretting his tone. "Listen, Mal..."

She ran away while he called after her. She hated being interrupted, she hated feeling like she was a bad person, she hated what Ben had said and what Gil had said, she hated hated hated that she knew that she wasn't going to stop using magic this way or using feelings this way, that she knew the lesson but still hadn't learned it.

Ben watched her go with a growing knot in his stomach that told him he was hurting people again.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

It was close to evening when Gil and Jonas and Desiree returned to base.

Uma took in their downtrodden expressions. "Bad haul today?" she guessed.

"We got some bags of chips and one of those tubes of tiny M&Ms, half-full," Gil said, and it _had_ to have been a bad day, because otherwise "half-full container of tiny M &Ms" would have been the _headline_.

"Who are these guys?" Desiree asked bluntly, looking over the newest crew members (all curled up and asleep) with her eyes widened as if she had come home to find Goldilocks in her bed.

"Cursed," Uma said. "Doug brought them to us. And they ate up a lot of food, so I guess some of us are going to town tomorrow."

"Yes!" Gil hissed, instantly cheered. "Can I come?"

"Sure. Jo, Zo, you two are gonna stay here and watch over the newbies while the rest of us head out tomorrow. Cool?"

"Yes ma'am," Gonzo said, while Jonas just nodded crankily.

"So..." Gil sat down facing Uma, forming a tight circle between himself, her, and Harry, who was reclined back against the base of a tree. "We need to talk. About today."

Uma nodded. "You first."

Harry sat up to listen.

They exchanged tales for the day. Uma was intrigued by the idea of "Cousin" Ben wanting to see her. Harry was irked both by Ben trying to meet with them _and_ by Mal taking the opportunity away, which seemed like rather a no-win state of being. Gil smiled when he heard that Doug was helping cursed-borns, and he frowned in confusion when Uma told him about the information she'd wheedled out about Pan's fading.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"It either means that Pan's life force came from nature, or that it came from protecting nature, or something like that, but it gives us a lead," Uma said, so excitedly that Gil became excited even though he still didn't entirely understand. "I think it means that it matters what each of the gods stand for; they need the things they represent. Their domain _is_ their strength."

"So what do we do about that?" Gil asked breathlessly.

Uma picked at a loose bit of thread in her shoe. "I have some thoughts," she said vaguely. "I'm still thinking it through."

They ate chips that night, and Gil polished off the tiny M&Ms before Uma could even assign first guard duty (to Gonzo).

She laid down between her first and second mate and drifted off as their breathing started to sync up.

She thought about cursed children- Greek curses, Roman curses, how many children must that be? She wouldn't be able to find and protect all of them. Certainly not if they stayed on this hill forever. Roman forms. Why hadn't she been told about Roman forms, about a whole 'nother set of demigods? Why were they camping out at Half-Blood Hill if the demigod world was apparently so vast? As sleep grew nearer, the thoughts and questions swirled into half-formed _Why Why does I should Why doesn't I wonder if Why didn't I should have I could Maybe if I_

She was in a cave.

Not in a cave- she was underground, in a rocky atrium with a pit in the middle that seemed so primordially bottomless, even from this many feet away, that she shivered and backed into a wall.

 _"Hello again, Uma,"_ said the dream voice, speaking in a more sugary tone than it had ever used before and seeming to fill the entire space with its sheer vastness and volume. She felt it in her bones, and it ached like aging.

She took a breath. "Hello again, Wizard Kelly." (A weak insult, but she was struggling.)

The voice laughed. Each sound it made pained her physically, prickled and twinged like a slow-healing wound.

"I'm gonna wake up now," she said, as firmly as she could, while trying to enforce this statement on a frazzled mind.

 _"I understand your discomfort,"_ the voice said. _"It is common for mortals to be uncomfortable here. The feeling lessens when you come near the pit."_

"You think I'm that stupid?" Uma asked, reaching for a sword that of course wasn't there.

 _"I think you're very clever,"_ the voice purred back. _"I would not have chosen you, otherwise."_

"Chosen me." Uma's throat had dried, so her voice came out raspy.

 _"Some would be honored,"_ the voice continued, in a coy tone that indicated that it already knew how Uma would feel about that suggestion.

"Who are you?" she growled out.

_"I am family. And an ally, I think."_

"So far, your alliance sucks."

_"Come closer."_

"No. What am I here for? What do you want?"

 _"I have watched you."_ The voice paused, as if trying to let its flatly obvious message sink in. _"I think you could be my champion."_

"I don't rep immortals," Uma said. "Ask one of those _campers;_ they love to go on quests for the gods."

 _"I am no mere god!"_ the voice roared, and Uma withered to the ground with her hands clamped over her ears. She stayed in that position through the silence that followed, and when the voice spoke again, it was softer and felt like the numbing of an injury. _"I am the substance that gives existence meaning. The mending of skin and the withering of mountains. The reduction of lit candles to puddles of wax. The currency of first steps and last steps."_

The name fell out of Uma's lips unplanned and unthought: "Kronos." The voice made a sound as if it was pleased to hear its name, which emboldened Uma's determination to never use it again. She stood and returned her back to the wall. "That doesn't tell me why I'm here."

 _"You are here because I noticed that our interests aligned,"_ Kronos said.

"That I doubt, Granddad."

There was a low rumble sound that Uma interpreted as Kronos managing to keep a grip on his patience. _"You seek the decline of the gods."_

 _Do I?_ That was quite an assumption. She was still working out what her end goal was; all she knew for sure was that they would have to move their residence from Half-Blood Hill pretty soon. And her feelings about Poseidon...She was still working things out. "You don't know what I seek," Uma said neutrally.

_"I do, even if perhaps you don't yourself."_

"I'm gonna wake up," Uma tried again.

_"You have only been asleep for roughly two minutes."_

Uma was going to say that that wasn't possible, but then she remembered she was talking to Kronos. How many immortals were inexplicably invested in her life? First the Olympians casting bets on her beef with the camp, now... "What do you want?" she asked again.

There was another rumble, but this time it seemed more one of anticipation than irritation. _"Well, **Captain**..."_ (That's right! He was supposed to call her Captain. When had he stopped calling her Captain?? Why hadn't she noticed?) _"I have taken many champions in my time, and all have failed me. Yet still I observe mortals, and still I select champions. Can you imagine why that is?"_ (A stony face and silence were Uma's only response. Her whole body was shaking.) _"I have been around for many millennia, and in my experience, it almost always takes a demigod to kill a god."_ His words grew louder as he spoke, until the last words- "kill a god kill a god kill a god" -echoed back and forth, either in the cave or in Uma's skull; she couldn't tell which, but it seemed to stretch into eternity eternity eternity eternity eternity before she woke with Harry's and Gil's worried faces inches from hers. 

Her ears were ringing and throbbing so that their voices sounded muffled when they asked if she was okay. There were tears streaming down her face, which she belatedly noticed but hastily wiped away.

Lightheaded, she stood, took a few steps toward, and rested her weight against a tree. She threw up, just a little, because she had eaten just a little. When she was done throwing up, she struggled with breathing until Harry thrust the Olympian coal into her clammy hands and gave her some clarity.

The sky was blue like the sea, white-capped by clouds.

Harry and Gil each had a steady grip on one side of her, the crew behind her silent.

And somewhere out there, the titan Kronos knew her name.

The knowledge boiled inside her as she went through the motions of passing around the last of their food for breakfast, until, mid-swallow, her mind took the thought to its most accurate conclusion, and she found herself smiling smugly:

_...and he needs **my** help._


	6. Lessons from the Undying

"We're going _where?"_ Gil boggled.

"You heard me," Uma said mildly.

"In-land," Desiree recited back, unnecessarily.

They were all washing clothes in the lake: the whole crew, except for Uma, who was talking fish out of the water for lunch (surprisingly effective), and Desiree, who was guarding the supplies and keeping watch for monsters. It was rare for all ten of them to be in one place during the day; Uma sent them off in groups every morning to dilute the demigod smell. But she had decided that today was wash day, and the lake was safe for them.

Safe enough to discuss plans.

"Are you sure that's a good idea, captain?" Harry asked. He had taken to making sure that he called Uma "captain" whenever he questioned her judgement. Also, it helped get the new crew members in the habit of using her title.

Uma sighed. "Desi, take out the gas station atlas."

Desi did, handing them a blue booklet from one of the bags, and Uma and Harry broke off to strategize over it.

"We can keep close to the Great Lakes for a while," Uma said, tracing the imagined path with her finger. "After that, rivers. But I want to get to the midwest; it's hard enough to be a demigod that far from camp, let alone a cursed-born."

"We don't even know who we're looking for," Harry said softly.

"That's why we need someone who can tell a demigod from a mortal, and a cursed-born from a hero."

"You want to kidnap Doug again? I have dibs on kidnapping, right?"

"Not Doug; he's already shown that he'll recruit for us on his own. It'd be a waste to force him to."

"I can get a different satyr."

"Maybe." Uma had a different creature in mind, but she didn't want to say it out loud yet. "Not all of us are going away, either. Someone has to stay behind to take in whoever Doug _does_ find on this end."

"Not me or Gil," Harry said adamantly.

"No," Uma agreed. "Probably Gonzo, Jonas, and the new four. Maybe Desi, too; we don't want too many people to abandon the hill at once. The heroes might get spoiled."

"Desi will _not_ take that well," Harry said, placing a solemn hand on Uma's shoulder.

No, she wouldn't. But the reason they _knew_ that was part of the reason Uma was thinking about leaving Desi behind at all; Desiree was fast and loyal and a true asset, but more and more, she had been acting like Uma was her mother or something. She bickered with the new recruits, especially Bonny, when they seemed to be demanding too much of Uma's attention, and she wheedled at Uma for words of praise or affirmation for any little task she completed, and she begged to be in Uma's group every single morning, and she followed Uma around their campsite in her downtime, and it had become exhausting for Uma to keep her in line without hurting her feelings. Even Harry, who loved hurting people's feelings on Uma's behalf, had developed a soft spot for Desiree by now; she was like an annoying little sister.

"It might be good for her to have to learn to be part of a crew instead of _just_ under a captain," Uma said. She felt strangely guilty, but she couldn't afford to be coddling anyone, let alone _mothering_. She was too young to be anyone's mother; she had barely had a mother of her own to begin with. And if Desi was allowed to cling now, she would never let go.

"So what's our next move?" Harry asked. There were purplish shadows under his eyes; he had been guarding all night because he refused to take the coal back from her after her run-in (?) with Kronos, and he didn't want to give in to the Jonas-induced nightmares either. The shadows probably weren't noticeable to most people; he still had that eyeliner, and that was what most people focused on.

Uma found herself looking at his face a lot lately. She couldn't say she blamed herself; his face was great.

"Our next move: We find a creature to bring with us. Something we can convince not to fight back."

Harry grinned wickedly. "Shall I scope out the satyrs?"

"Do that. Call Gil over, though; I have a job for him, too."

Gil, who had been dutifully finishing up Harry's abandoned laundry, loped over when his name was called.

Uma repeated the briefing she had just given Harry, then told her second mate, "I need you to come with me someplace."

"Right now?" he asked.

"No. Sometime tonight, we're gonna head off." (That was the only reason she had accepted the coal last night; she had known that she would need her sleep in order to do what needed doing tonight.) "We're going to...explore some caves."

"Caves?" Harry repeated, sounding wary. "And I'm not meant to go with you?"

" _You_ are going to take the coal tonight and go to sleep," Uma said. "Gil and I are going to see if we can find a cyclops."

"A cyclops?" both Harry and Gil repeated.

"For what?" Harry asked.

"They can smell a demigod just as well as a satyr can, but they're creatures of Poseidon," Uma said reasonably. "Technically half-siblings to me. Might be easier to get along with than a satyr; cyclopes are the black sheep of the creature world, and we're the black sheep of the demigod world."

Harry had a frozen, wide-eyed expression. "You're mad," he informed her, but he said it like a marriage proposal. "A cyclops..." He shook his head in morbid wonder.

"It'd be nice to have a cyclops friend," Gil mused. "It could tear things limb from limb for us."

"I'd tear things limb from limb for you," Harry said, sounding almost wounded.

Uma grinned into the map as Gil and Harry made lingering eye contact. Something was blossoming there; that much she knew. Something different was happening between those two, more and more. Surprisingly, despite the fact that she had experienced rushes of territorial fury just from people brushing against Harry or Gil when they didn't have to, this blooming affection between them didn't bother her. Quite the contrary, actually: whenever she was present to see Harry threaten and terrify a camper who made fun of Gil, she could only feel ecstatic that someone as aggressive as Harry was allied with her in protecting Gil; and whenever she saw Gil catch Harry before he could trip over something in this stupid freaking forest or hold Harry back from a fight that he probably wouldn't win, she could only feel deeply grateful that they had come by Gil's gentle, quiet strength.

And then there were moments like these, when the two of them just sort of started staring at each other openly, both with their eyes kind of wide, and Gil's face immediately turned pink, and Harry's tongue dipped out just slightly to lick his lips (or to taste the tension in the air like some sort of lizard).

"Hey!" Desiree suddenly called out. "What are you doing? You're supposed to be washing your clothes!"

"I finished, and you're not the captain," Bonny called back, rolling her eyes as she carried her pile of wet clothing out of the lake.

"I'm third mate, and I'm supervising," Desiree said importantly.

"You're on watch for _monsters_ , Desi," Uma said firmly. "Monsters or campers. You don't boss the crew around; that's my job. And if you keep trying to do my job, laundry duty's all on you next time."

Desiree pouted, crossing her arms and glaring at Bonny (who looked indifferent) as if _she_ had started it.

Uma turned back to the boys, whose concentration on each other had been broken. She pointed at Gil. "Tonight. Caves." She pointed at Harry. "Scope out the satyrs."

And two faces looked back at her: one split wide with a grin that promised terror to some satyrs, and one filled with determination and still blushing just slightly.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Desiree trudged at the back of the group, and she was bummed that nobody seemed to notice, except for Bonny, who kept glancing back at her as if annoyed that she was dragging behind.

Uma was up front, talking to Jonas. Desiree had the sneaking suspicion that, despite the title that Uma had given her when she'd first joined, Jonas had somehow taken on the _actual_ role of third mate; when she was done conferring with Harry and Gil, it was almost always Jonas who Uma spoke with next, in hushed tones. Of course, Desiree had listened in most of the time; she was a daughter of Hermes, after all. But on this occasion, she wasn't in the mood to pretend her rank mattered.

They were just going to collect more and more crew members, and she was going to become smaller and smaller. She was at home all over again, with her siblings all squirming around, taking up space and time and making it so that it took her mother upward of five seconds to remember her name. There, she hadn't been Desiree; she had been "Um...uh...D...Desiree!", with accompanying finger snaps to jog Mom's memory. Here, she was Desi. And she wrapped herself in that when she needed comfort, held close the fact that Uma had honored her with a new name, a new self.

Uma had left her fingerprint on Desiree's entire identity, and Desi refused to wash it away for anything.

"You're getting left behind," Bonny said impatiently, beginning to hang back as well.

"If I do get left, Uma will come looking for me," Desi said.

"You're going to make Captain search these woods for you instead of walking a little faster?" Bonny rolled her eyes.

"Mind your own business," Desi shot back.

"Stop being a baby and slowing everybody down just because you got yelled at."

"I'm not slowing _everybody_ down. I'm slowing _me_ down."

"You're always bringing up how you've been here for longer than me, but you still don't get what it means to be a part of a crew." Bonny had scars on her face. Little ones- one through her eyebrow, one on her chin and trailing down under her jaw a bit -, but they made her seem like she always knew what she was talking about. Or maybe it was her eternally-serious expression. But she wasn't really above it all; whenever she had her hands free, one (or both) of them was always holding the knife that Uma had given her. Flicking at the blade, or swishing it through empty air. She had it in hand now, and her fingers were tracing it idly. Reveling in her knife like Desi reveled in her name.

"You're not better than me," Desiree said.

Bonny looked into her eyes for a few seconds, and she must have seen something there, because she left her alone, and Desi slowed down even more just out of spite.

Well, maybe not _just_ spite. Thinking about home, about Mom and about being nothing, had made her feel fragile, and the idea of letting Uma search for her, letting someone be worried about her, was sounding like an appealing option.

And so, her feet slowed down, and as the sounds of her companions, of Gonzo joking with Gil and Harry singing unfamiliar songs, grew fainter, her feet stopped altogether.

She stood for a while.

"I'm alone," she said aloud, to no one.

She wondered how long it would take Uma to notice. 

It had taken Mom a little over two days to realize that she was hiding in a hallway closet when she was six, that she hadn't been to meals or school. But Uma kept track of everything. She was a perfect captain. She would notice before nightfall at _least_.

Her feet were beginning to sink into the dirt the way they often did when she stood still for a long time. That was a part of her curse. She wasn't sure what god or goddess had cursed her, but whoever it was had possessed an impeccable sense of cruel irony. She was a daughter of Hermes; her greatest skill was swift movement. And yet, it was also her curse. Whenever she stopped moving, she eventually began to settle. It didn't happen when she was sleeping, and it never went farther than her knees; if the ground just swallowed her up completely, then she wouldn't be forced to live with the curse. And where was the fun in that?

As curses went, it was mostly just a nuisance, but it got her in the habit of shifting her footing whenever possible. Except now, because she didn't feel like it. In fact, a somewhat-desperate part of her decided that it would be better for Uma to find her knee-deep in dirt. Maybe she would worry.

Desiree stared dispassionately down at where her feet had been, now eaten by the dirt as she stood ankle-deep.

 _This is stupid_ , she thought. It was. It was stupid to just stand here, waiting to be looked for, still craving, after all this time, for someone to be afraid of losing her. She was being immature. _Stop being immature._

Suddenly, there was a rustling in the trees above her, as if something very large had just landed in the branches.

_Oh, great._

And sure enough, as soon as she tilted her head up to look, there was a row of sharp teeth, belonging to a creature that she did not get to see because within a second she had to turn her face away to dodge the creature's dribble.

 _"Gross,"_ she complained as the stuff soaked her shirt, which was maybe not the right reaction as the creature started to lower itself toward her.

Desi made to run but was tripped up by the dirt encasing her feet. She landed on her stomach, and she rolled over onto her back just in time to see a large, clawed hand swiping through the space she had been occupying moments ago.

Then there was a blur of something shiny sailing through the air, and a knife lodged itself in the creature's abdomen just as it started to lunge for Desiree. The monster turned to dust before it could land, coating Desi in its disintegrated remains.

"Ugh," she said. "Even more gross." But there were hands hauling her to her feet, and she pivoted to see that _Bonny_ was the one who had saved her.

"What are you still doing here?" the other girl demanded. "And why didn't you run? Isn't that your whole thing? You're a daughter of Hermes."

"I know I am," Desi said dazedly.

"Why were your feet...why did you sink like that?" Bonny asked, and Desiree began to wonder how long Bonny had been watching her. Had she been waiting for her to rejoin the group?

"It's a part of my curse," Desiree told her, and soon she was telling her everything about the curse, even though she wasn't really friends with Bonny. Then again, maybe it was _because_ they weren't friends, and she was sure that Bonny probably wouldn't retain this personal information about a not-friend.

"Styx," Bonny sighed, retrieving her knife from the dust pile. "You're lucky I was here."

"I could have still outrun it," Desi said, and she was sure that it wasn't a lie; she was very quick.

"You should've just stayed with the crew in the first place."

Desiree didn't disagree. Instead, she defensively asked, "Well, why were you here? Did you stop to wait for me?"

Bonny huffed. "Captain would be upset if anything happened to you."

Desi had avoided her fair share of questions in life, so she recognized the evasion for what it was and broke into a teasing smile. "That's not an answer," she sang. "You stayed back to protect me."

"To keep our captain from worrying," Bonny reinforced. " _Not_ because you aren't the most annoying person I've ever met."

"Whatever." Desi shook out her feet to get the dirt out of her shoes and to keep from sinking again.

"Let's just get to base before everyone freaks out."

They walked along in silence. Well, silence except for Desiree humming to herself, in defiance of the irritated glances Bonny kept shooting at her. Desi didn't mind that she annoyed people; annoying people meant that she still existed.

"I'm going to tell Captain that this was your fault," Bonny said suddenly.

Desiree rolled her eyes. "Fine," she said. "She likes me more than you anyway."

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Despite the fact that Harry was full of rage towards Desi and Bonny for inexplicably breaking ranks and distressing Uma so much with their absence (on this most inopportune of nights, when she needed to focus on preparing for cyclops hunting), a part of him was pleased that this at least meant that he got to do his job.

After having heard their story- about Desi hanging back for no disclosed reason, and Bonny waiting in case something happened, and the monster attack -Uma had been positively steaming. She had raised a hand for silence, which had abruptly fallen, and had ground out, "Deal with it, Harry," and then stormed away.

Stormed. What an apt description.

Harry turned on the two guilty-faced crew members before him.

He assessed the magnitude of the sense of wronged-ness he felt when he looked at each of them; he had a good sense of that sort of thing. He had never given much thought to what was a proportionate response, before; why think on such a thing, when you could punish your enemies a _dis_ proportionate amount so much more easily? And with so much more satisfaction? Still, being a son of Nemesis, it wasn't actually hard for him to determine what _would_ constitute a "fair" punishment, if he tried for it.

Making note of the spiteful glances the two kept shooting each other in their restlessness for his verdict, Harry raised his chin, pointed at each of them in turn, and said, "Well, yeh've enraged Captain good and proper. And you almost made your crewmates have to search for you. Here's your punishment: You two are partnered for pirating duty for the next month."

"With _her?"_ both of them exclaimed.

Harry swept his hook upward suddenly, causing them both to jump a little. "And. You're both on garbage cleanup for two weeks; if something hits the ground, you either bag it or burn it before Captain can even wrinkle her nose."

"Since when do we care about trash?" Desi groaned.

"Since we don't want the campers knowing where we piss," Harry retorted.

"Will you stop talking back?" Bonny demanded with an askance glare at Desiree. "You're just gonna get us in more trouble."

"Don't tell me what to do," Desi grumbled.

"And every time I hear you two arguing again, I'll add a week to your sentence," Harry finished. He was pleased with the caliber of his punishment; cruel enough to educate, but not too cruel to inflict on a crew member in good conscience. "Now, I see scraps on the ground; get cleaning."

They got to it.

A few minutes later, Uma returned to base, her fury having subsided.

"I handled it," Harry said, crouching slightly because he was significantly taller than her now and he wanted her attention.

"Good. Thanks." She quelled him with an acknowledging look. "It's getting dark."

Harry pouted. "Cyclops hunting?" he sighed, with a glance to be sure the rest of the crew were out of earshot. Only Jonas and Gonzo knew where their captain and Gil would be going tonight; everyone else was in the dark, and would stay that way unless Uma actually brought home a cyclops.

Uma nodded. "Take this," she said, handing him the No Nightmares coal and preempting any argument with a stern look. "Get some rest. Gonzo's on guard duty tonight. Make sure everybody eats. Gil?"

Their second mate leaped to his feet. "Cyclops time?"

Uma smiled. "Let's go kick some eye and make some friends."

"No way this goes well," Jonas said.

"If it doesn't, Harry's captain," Uma pointed out, her smile turning into a smirk. Then she and Gil walked off into the trees.

Like he was bloody going to sleep after she said _that!_

"I'm guarding tonight," Harry told Gonzo.

"But Uma said-"

"I need to know that they make it home alright." Harry's sharp tone left no room for argument. He hadn't thought much about Uma and Gil going to look for cyclopes when it was just words, but now that they were gone, it was like he was stuck in the feeling of missing a step on the stairs, and the only thing that kept him from running after them was the fact that _he_ had been trusted with the crew, and Uma took that sort of delegation seriously. And, if he went, Gil would take his pursuit as a sign that he didn't trust him to protect Uma.

"Uma's gonna be mad when she comes back and hears that you didn't sleep like you were supposed to," Jonas chided.

"She'll be mad at me, not you."

"I'm still gonna stay up," Gonzo hedged. "You can do what you want, but uh, I'm not getting her mad at me."

"Fine. Two-man shift." Harry turned his head to where the rest of the crew was hanging out around the fire. "Fingers, is the fish done yet?"

Lim, one of the new crew members (who Harry called "Fingers" because his fingers had been burnt when he'd arrived), startled a little but answered, "Yeah, it's all done."

"Well when were you going to tell us?" Harry asked, not with malice so much as exasperation.

Instead of answering, Lim inquired, "Where'd Captain go?"

"And Gil," Andrea, another newbie, agreed.

"That's none of our business," Desi said resolutely, and Harry caught Bonny shooting her a look as if she was surprised to agree with her. Crap, he hoped those two didn't start liking each other; his punishment wasn't a punishment at all if they became friends.

Then he remembered that getting them to treat each other like crew members was kind of the point. His vindictive side had been shouting over his logical side for a moment. Right.

"Just cut up the fish," Harry ordered. They owned dinner plates, now, because their group size was making it inconvenient to just share by hand. Uma had said it made them 'almost civilized'.

He oversaw the distribution of the fish, then he told the crew to go to sleep and extinguished the fire.

Jonas glanced at him before heading to his sleep space.

"What?" Harry asked, aware that the word came out a bit too sharp, but also aware that Jonas at least would understand why he was on edge.

And he did. "If they're not back by dawn, we all go after them," Jonas said firmly. It was unclear whether he was promising Harry or asking Harry to promise him, but the answer was the same regardless:

"Of course."

Jonas nodded and settled down to sleep. It was weird to say that anything about Jonas was a comfort, especially given his fear-provoking aura, but Harry liked knowing that he was on their side. Not just him. Having a crew was surprisingly...well...nice? Yes, he supposed...it was nice.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

"So how do we actually find a cyclops?" Gil asked, scratching his head with the hand that wasn't holding on to Uma to make sure he didn't slip away from her in the dark. It had been brought to his attention that his night vision and his nimble navigation of the wilderness made him kind of "slippery", to normal people.

"They like caves, and they like water," Uma said simply. "So we know what to look for."

All of Gil's senses suddenly shouted at him to turn around, and a split second later, there was laughter behind them.

Uma pivoted, her sword ready to slice through something, but the man from whom the laughter was coming looked just like a mortal jogger in a mailman hat. It didn't take a genius to know that he wasn't mortal, though; besides the fact that it didn't make sense for a mortal, jogger _or_ mailman, to be on this specific hillside at this specific time, the man looked unsurprised by the blade pointing at his sternum. Quite the contrary: he looked at Uma's sword as though he recognized it.

"Caves and water. Well, that's that cyclops found, isn't it?" the man teased, something like camaraderie in his voice.

"You'd better not be another Olympian, because I'm getting real tired of gods laughing at me," Uma said hotly.

"Guilty," the man said. "The name's Hermes. Mind walking with me?" The man who was apparently an Olympian advanced a few steps so that he passed them up, then paused as though waiting for them to follow.

Gil was brimming with questions, but he managed to keep quiet, partially because he remembered to look to Uma first and saw that she was contemplating. After a few seconds, she started walking- Gil falling into step along with her -and asked, "Why are you here?"

"Because I want to talk," Hermes answered, and it was frankly surprising how laidback he seemed.

"On whose behalf?"

"My own."

"You're Desi's dad," Gil said.

Hermes's laidback gait seemed to wilt just a little. "That's right. My least fortunate daughter. I am indebted to you, for taking her in."

"I didn't know gods cared about that sort of thing," Uma said.

"You'd be surprised, the sorts of things gods care about."

"You didn't care enough to do something for her yourself."

"Careful, child." His suddenly-steely tone brought about several seconds of silence. Then Hermes turned around, continuing to lead the way whilst walking backwards. "So, this pirating gig you've got going. As the god of thieves, I will say it definitely caught my attention. Would've expected you to burn me some offerings, but it's no biggie; you're spread pretty thin food-wise. I get it. And you're planning on going on a long trip soon; I'm also the god of travelers, you know. Honestly, you should have probably been expecting me to pay you a visit sooner or later. Especially now that you've got _that_."

Uma frowned as she looked where he was pointing. "My sword?"

"Reliable blade. Very distinct hilt. And, most importantly-"

"...stolen?" Uma guessed.

"Right!"

"Harry stole it for me."

"Of course he did. He's a son of Nemesis; it's in his nature to restore balance, even unknowingly."

"What do you mean?"

" _Boy_ , was I excited when he nabbed that thing for you. It was all I would talk about for a solid two days; just ask George and Martha."

"I don't know who George and Martha are. What's the big deal about the sword?"

"It belonged to another child of Poseidon before you: Theseus."

Uma's eyebrows rose. Gil had to help her maneuver over a tricky tangle of tree roots, she was so focused on the sword in her hand. "This is Theseus's sword? Then why did someone in the camp have it?"

"That's a long story, starting with Theseus being thrown off a cliff and Cimon, son of Athena, finding his bones. Basically, Cimon reburied Theseus, but he kept the sword. It circulated among Athena's children for centuries. Until now. You're the first child of Poseidon to wield it since Theseus."

"Wow," Gil said. He couldn't wait for Harry to find out that he had bestowed this kind of a treasure on Uma without even knowing it. Gil was half tempted to run back to base _now_ , just to tell him. He would be so proud of himself.

"Right?!" Hermes exclaimed. "Who says thievery can't make amazing things happen! It's an omen, of course. But, like my brother Ares, I'm more interested in what the sword can do."

Uma walked her fingers over the blade. "I'm listening."

"A long time ago, Poseidon offered Theseus three curses. Like three wishes, sort of. Theseus used one of them to curse his son, Hippolytus, to die within the day. The other two were unused by the time he died. Which means they live inside his blade."

"And none of the Athena kids who owned the sword have used the wishes since?" Uma said skeptically.

"They couldn't; the wishes belong to a child of Poseidon."

Gil saw Uma's hands tighten around the hilt of her sword. "Okay. Why are you telling me this?"

"Because, firstly, it would be easy for you to waste a wish, if you weren't careful. If you, in specific terms and out loud, wished ill upon a mortal enemy while holding the sword, then that curse would be carried out against them. And you strike me as the kind of person who would want to save that kind of power." There was a beat of silence, as Hermes waited for a reply from Uma that was not forthcoming. "Secondly, I'm telling you because, as the god of messengers, I know that information can be a powerful gift, and as such, this information is my gift of choice to fulfill my debt to you for protecting Desiree: The two curses embedded in the sword don't have to be used offensively." He said the words so heavily, it made Gil hold his breath even though he had no idea what the Olympian was trying to say.

"Meaning...?" Uma prompted.

"Do you know what arai are?"

"No."

"They're physical manifestations of curses. They are the entities that embody the ill wishes of others. When a mortal or monster wishes harm upon another, there is an ara to represent that ill will. And if the object of the hatred were to kill the ara, the harm wished upon them would be made real."

"I don't follow," Gil said.

Hermes sighed. "Okay. Say Person A hates Person B and wishes he got, say, a bad head cold. Well, they're both mortals, so it doesn't really matter, _unless_ Person B kills the ara that represents that grudge, in which case the head cold wished upon them by Person A would become real. Get it?"

"I got it," Uma said.

"Great. But for immortals, it's a little different. A god's curse actually means something, whether you kill the ara or not. So it's the opposite; killing the ara erases the curse."

Uma's eyes went wide. "So, all a cursed-born would have to do would be to kill the ara specific to their curse, and they'd be scott free?" (Privately, she wondered whether Kronos had known all of this about the sword. She would most definitely be having words with him, in their next dream chat.)

"Not quite. Killing the ara for an _immortal's_ curse would kill you...under most circumstances. But with your sword..." Hermes trailed off for a second, seemingly to let his implication sink in. "Two curses left. Used defensively, that would be protection enough to kill two arai without consequences. Which means you can get rid of the curses of two people."

Uma fully looked struck speechless. Gil looked between her and Hermes almost helplessly. And the Olympian himself raised both of his feet off of the ground, as if hopping onto an invisible stair step, and wings suddenly unfolded from the backs of his running shoes.

"Well, do with that what you will. I'll be seeing you two. Oh! And there's someone at the bottom of the hill who can guide you to a cyclops." And then the god of messengers flew off into the night.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Harry yawned for nine seconds straight.

"Dude," Gonzo said. "You _can_ go to sleep."

Harry was too irritable from exhaustion to even respond, although he did offer his most expressive finger for close examination. Sleep was tempting him so much that it physically hurt, but fear for his friends kept him awake. The idea of anything happening to them made it hard to breathe; his heart itself seemed to be trying to break free of his ribcage and make chase. It was theirs anyway, his heart.

"It doesn't accomplish anything, for you to _not_ sleep," Gonzo continued. "We're waiting the same amount of time either way. And your body is a machine; it's got to rest at some point."

"You compare everything to a machine," Harry snapped weakly.

"We use the imagery we're comfortable with," said a girl's voice, as matter-of-factly as though she'd been a part of the conversation all along.

Both Harry and Gonzo suddenly noticed the speaker: an extra person sitting among the sleeping crew, poking at the extinguished campfire with a stick. She looked about their age, maybe even younger, with a calming disposition. Something about her set of features, her eyes and lips and cheeks and nose, reminded Harry of Uma, and of Gil, and of both his sisters (long though it had been since he'd seen them). There even seemed to be inexplicable elements of Jonas and Gonzo and Desiree mixed in, in her ears and hair and jaw. Past that, though, Harry couldn't help seeing something of the Furies in the way she moved. Something like his father in the intense determination with which she jabbed at the dead fire. And there was a bizarre oldness in her eyes that made Harry wish they'd noticed her _before_ she was right on them.

"Who are you?" he demanded, while Gonzo pawed around in the dark for his weapon.

He got a smile but no answer. "I don't normally interact this directly, but I sympathize with the lost. Those who have no place to lay their mat, no place to lay their coal...I am drawn to them."

Harry stared at the charred wood that the girl was prodding with her stick. Somehow, the name was already leaving his mouth: "Hestia." Goddess of the hearth. Of home and family.

She smiled wider, and a flame came to life under her stick, tinting them all with yellow light and spastically-moving shadow. "Hello, Harry. Hello, Gonzo. I'm very proud of both of you."

Harry repressed the warmth she (somehow) inspired with her genuine-sounding comment (Too genuine. Entirely too genuine for a stranger who reminded him so much of people he loved and people he feared.) and focused on being incensed at receiving judgement, even positive judgement, from a random goddess. "And why would that be?" he asked.

"You crafted your own family, your own hearth," Hestia answered straightforwardly. "You made a hearth for others. That is an extremely difficult thing to do, and it is so brave of both of you to be open to familial love after all that you've been through. So I am proud of you. I'm so very proud."

Harry sneered to cover up the tight feeling in his heart, and he turned to Gonzo only to find that the older crewmate was crying silently.

"Why are you here?" Harry asked.

Hestia tempered the growing flame to keep it from growing too large. In the undulating light, Harry found he saw the Furies in her even more. "The same reason Hermes spoke with your friends Uma and Gil earlier: because you will be going on a long trip very soon, and you do not yet fully understand the tools available to you."

"Hermes?" Harry repeated sharply. "What's Hermes want with Uma and Gil?"

"Nothing they won't tell you upon their return," Hestia said patiently. "Please, Harry Hook, try to listen. Uma received a gift from me, rather a while ago. A gift that she has since given to you. Do you know of what I speak?"

The coal in Harry's pocket felt warm, but he kept his expression neutral. "Perhaps, perhaps not."

Hestia chuckled quietly. "Very well. You should know that it doesn't just keep the nightmares away: it connects its holder with the part of themselves that is at home."

"What in the Styx does that mean?" Harry asked.

"It can mean many things," Hestia said. "Tonight, perhaps it just means that you will be made aware if harm comes to the ones you love. Perhaps it means you can do what your friends suggest and get some sleep."

In the comforting warmth of the fire, it seemed Harry's exhaustion had impossibly doubled. He knew, with certainty, now, that he would not make it through the entire night. It was doubtful he'd clear the next ten minutes.

"You will need your strength," Hestia said softly. "I cannot see the future, but I know that the life of a cursed demigod is never easy. Your family will need you to be rested. In the words of a mortal poet whom I admittedly disliked, 'The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack'." She prodded the hearth once more, and the fire went out all at once, and with it, Harry fell promptly asleep.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

The guide Hermes had told them about turned out to be a wild, black dog, which wasn't even close to the weirdest revelation of the day, so they followed the dog with minimal surprise.

"Should we talk about what he said?" Gil asked gently. Uma was being especially quiet, and she seemed agitated.

"What do you want to say?" Uma asked. The way her voice sounded made Gil even more worried that he already had been. She sounded so...regretful. This was probably as close as Uma ever got to sounding defeated.

"I...I don't know," he answered honestly. He could hear the concern, approaching panic, in his own voice. "What are _you_ thinking?"

Uma sighed. "I'm thinking killing two arai isn't enough."

"But it's something, right?" Gil legitimately didn't understand why Uma wasn't alight with victorious joy. It seemed liked Hermes's news was the sort of information she'd have killed for.

"It is," Uma agreed, "but I'm not captain of a two-person crew. Not anymore. And even if I was, you swore on the River Styx that you wouldn't stay in Camp Half-Blood, and killing the ara cursing you wouldn't solve that. And Harry would never live anywhere you weren't."

"So just don't use the wishes on us."

"You want me to choose two of our crew members to save and leave the rest out here? Which two? Based on what: How much we like them? How much they need help? How much they want to live in camp? Or should we vote on who gets to be safe and let the crew silently resent each other and themselves afterward? There isn't a single person in our crew who I thinks deserves to be free of their curse more or less than the rest do. Two isn't enough."

Gil found himself understanding the horror of Uma's situation. Two really _wasn't_ enough. It wasn't fair to _anyone_. "So what are you going to do?"

"I don't _know_. I don't know." A second's pause. "I'll save the wishes until I do know."

"Okay," Gil said brightly, trying to clearly convey that he knew that whatever Uma chose would be great. "You always do the right thing."

Uma groaned. "Don't say _that,"_ she said, which was quite an out-of-character sentiment from someone who had relished in praise for as long as he'd known her. "That just means I'm overdue to disappoint you all."

Gil was unsure how she could possibly have gotten this idea, but he was quick to disabuse her of it. "Uma, you really think you could ever disappoint us? You've saved all of us a million times over."

" _You've_ saved me just as much as I've saved you, by now," she said, with a smile beginning to form. "I stopped keeping score after the first year."

"Well, saving you counts as saving myself," Gil said simply. "Where would I be without you and Harry?"

The smile left Uma's face, and Gil would have thought that he'd done something wrong were it not for the life that had returned to her eyes. "I'm going to ask you something," she said slowly, "and I'm not asking as your captain; you can answer how you want."

"You're always my captain," he laughed.

Her expression dimmed. "Never mind, then." She strode ahead, keeping even pace with the dog.

"Wait! Did I say something wrong?"

"No." She looked back at him with a reassuringly fond smile, but Gil couldn't help but feel like he'd just missed out on something big.

"But what were you going to say?"

"Doesn't matter; we're looking for a cyclops. We'll talk about other stuff later. I promise."

The dog barked, as if in agreement. Gil wondered how much it understood.

Then they came upon what appeared to be a closed bodega, and the dog sat down as though finished with its journey.

"Um..." Gil looked around. There were other buildings, sparse and mostly abandoned, but it was unmistakably _this_ one that the dog had stopped in front of. "I don't see a cave. Or water."

"Well, our friend here seems pretty sure," Uma said, and she approached the glass door, which was so papered with ads that it might just as well have not been glass. She took out a thin knife and set to work forcing the door open. Harry and Desi were their best at picking locks, but Uma was no slouch either, as evidenced by her having the door opened after only two false starts and twelve seconds.

A bell jingled over the door, which was not great for stealth, so Gil preceded Uma into the store, weapon at the ready.

The front of the store was dark and silent, but there was a tiny light source and a sort of humming noise coming from the back. Gil eased toward the sound, feeling Uma following so closely behind him that her feet instantly occupied the places his feet vacated. There was almost no moonlight coming into the store, which meant Gil's eyes were just as useless as Uma's were in this kind of darkness. He bumped into a shelf, froze for half a minute to be sure that nothing reacted to the sound, then continued walking.

They progressed further, almost to the back wall now, and rounded the corner of another shelf. From there, they saw what was making the noise: It was a microwave, heating up a plate of Something, with digital numbers counting down 4, 3, 2...

Uma and Gil both stumbled backward, but they only managed to trip over each other and bump into the shelf they had just rounded, and then the timer on the microwave hit zero, sending a shrill beeping noise through the bodega.

In a back room, a deep voice shouted, "My spinach puffs!"

Uma and Gil regained their footing just in time for a nearby door to open and a near-blinding flashlight beam to fall on them. Holding the flashlight was (though it took Gil a moment to see him, as his eyes were adjusting) a wall of a man, ( _And I thought_ I _had muscles._ ) dressed in striped pajamas and sporting wavy, dark hair and a chin so strong Gil was certain it would make his father weep in shame. And when he forced his eyes to move up past the man's chin, past his thin mouth and straight nose, Gil saw that he also had only one eye, large and centered.

"Intruders," the cyclops observed in the same deep voice, taking them in calmly. "Intruders in the bodega. Demigods, who have entered the bodega in an intrusive capacity. Demigod bodega intruders."

"We came to ask for your help. I'm a daughter of Poseidon," Uma replied, quick to get to the point. "That makes me your half-sister."

"Oh." The cyclops nodded once, the flashlight beam drooping a little, thankfully. "Riiiiight..."

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

"Hey, you're safe, you're at camp," Jay repeated. Carlos was still sweat-plastered and had two separate handfuls of Jay's pajamas, and he was blinking rapidly as if still trying to clear the nightmare away. Jay placed a cool hand against Carlos's cheek. "What's wrong? What did you see?"

Carlos took a slow breath, like he'd learned. One of his siblings had gone for Jay when they'd heard his nightmare getting bad- of course they'd gone for Jay; Cabin Five was the closest to run for. At least, that was probably the reason. Carlos shook his head, finally managing to really focus his eyes on Jay's earnest expression. "There was a voice," he managed to croak out. "It was a...just a voice, coming from...from a void."

 _Carlos De Vil_. It was like he could still hear it, like the echo was still dying down in his skull. _Poor, broken boy._

"A voice in a void? What did it say?"

_The gods have failed you, Carlos. I will not._

"It was saying..." Carlos was suddenly conscious that his cabin mates were mostly awake, mostly listening.

Jay noticed his uncomfortable glance at the others and said, "Come on, let's take a walk. We can pick up the others while we're out." And he put an arm around Carlos's still-shaking shoulders as they went.

~  
~ ~ ~  
~

Harry dreamed of the ocean, of hard water and soft water, of currents and coldness and warmth and bubbles spraying from between his lips, of the feeling of being such a small thing, and yet not minding.

He didn't know how long he let the currents carry him before the voice was calling him: "Harry. We're back."

And swiftly, he was shooting up through the surface of the sea, into the sunlight.

He sat up and Uma's face was there. She was staring at him as though he'd done something weird. Maybe he sat up too fast. It didn't matter: she was there, and Gil was right behind her. A dumb smile spread across Harry's face. "You fished me out."

"What are you talking about?" Uma asked, sounding exasperated but running her hand through Harry's hair in that wonderful way that made him positively turn to water.

"I was a part of the sea, and you reeled me in. You made me real again."

"I did tell you that Hestia put him to sleep," Gonzo offered.

"I didn't know you could be high on _sleep_ ," Jonas said.

"Harry?" Uma tugged at his hair a little. "Snap out of it; we have to talk. We saw Hermes yesterday."

That shook Harry out of it, at least partly. "Right! Hestia mentioned that. What did he want? And did you find a cyclops?"

Uma pointed over her shoulder with her thumb, at where Andrea and Desiree were staring, cross-armed, up at a tall, broad man in striped pajamas. "His name's Kronk. He says he's willing to go west with us, but not _with_ us. Like, he'll be on the same path as us, but we won't actually see or hear him unless we call for him or he decides to come out. Apparently he likes to run in a very dramatic way and sing his own theme music."

"He's looney, then?" Harry surmised.

"Well, we got a cyclops, and he doesn't want to eat us; I count it a win." She shrugged.

Harry couldn't help it; the grin was returning to his face.

"Tell him about the sword," Gil whispered, nudging Uma with his elbow.

"Soon," Uma promised. "When we're alone."

"I'm on the cyclops's back!" Desiree announced, and a glance proved her statement to be true.

"Get down from there," Bonny groaned.

"Make me." Desi climbed up higher until she was sitting on Kronk's shoulders.

"Seriously? You're such a child."

"Arguing?" Harry called out, and he received a simultaneous "No!" from both of them.

"Captain," Lim tentatively said, "why do we need a cyclops?"

Uma stood up. The crew accurately took this to mean that her sidebar with Harry and Gil had ended; they convened around her, all of them, and Kronk the cyclops wandered off after a squirrel. The captain looked at each of her crew members in turn, and she said, "Harry and Gil and I are gonna be going away for a little while."

The reaction was immediate.

"Going away?" Desiree repeated. "Just the three of you? Why? For how long?"

"We're heading west. Inland, like we've been saying. There's cursed-borns all over the country, and they need help just as much as we all did."

"You don't _have_ to be the one to help them."

"We didn't _have_ to be the ones to help _you_."

"Why can't we go with you?" Bonny asked. "Why can't we all go together?"

"Because, Doug is here, and he's bringing the cursed-borns he finds in New York to _this_ hill. There needs to be someone waiting for them here. Someone to take them in."

Desiree's eyes were wide with emotion. Even the new crew members seemed alarmed at the idea of Uma not being here. She had inspired their loyalty, given them a sense of normalcy. _You crafted your own family, your own hearth. You made a hearth for others._ It was a powerful thing, and a fragile thing. Harry knew that Uma was right that they should leave, but he felt suddenly that there was something else they were supposed to do first. Something very important.

"When are you coming back?" Andrea asked.

"It should only be a few months," Uma answered.

"What if something happens to you? How will we know?"

"What if we need you?"

Suddenly, it clicked into place for Harry: this sentiment was quite familiar. "Captain," he said quietly, reaching into his pocket. "Captain, I think we're supposed to leave them this."

He handed her the coal.

She stared at it for a second. "Why?"

"Just a feeling."

Her expression was skeptical. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled slightly. "Well, it is in your nature to restore balance." And with that confusing statement, she handed the coal to Desiree. "Keep this. It should...help."

Desi's hands closed over the coal (her eyes not leaving Uma), and everyone startled when fire suddenly sprang up from it. Desiree looked down at the active flames in her hand with mild surprise, but she didn't drop the coal. Harry's shoulders relaxed; she wasn't being burned. Shortly, the fire put itself out.

Well, that was either a good sign or it wasn't.

"It will let you know if harm comes to us," Harry contributed.

"I'll take good care of it," Desi said weakly.

"And take good care of your crewmates," Uma said, her authoritative tone softening just a little. "I'm leaving Jonas in charge, but you're still my third mate." She put her hand on Desi's shoulder. "Okay?"

Desi nodded, tears swimming in her eyes. "Okay."

"But..." Surprisingly, it was _Bonny_ who kept protesting. "But who's going to get fish for us? And who's going to make sure the campers don't take the lake back? Who's going to teach us how to fight and braid Desiree's hair and tell us who's on pirating duty?"

"Jonas can do almost all of those things," Uma said calmly.

"Hey." Desiree placed _her_ hand on _Bonny's_ shoulder. "It's okay." She quirked a light smile. "I'll just wear my hair down."

Bonny looked at Desiree with incredulity, but the breathy laugh escaped her like she couldn't help it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to cheat a little with the POV in one of Gil's sections, because Uma's thoughts were also important.
> 
> PLEASE COMMENT! XD Whether it's a single thought or a comprehensive list of everything you liked and hated, I want to read it!


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